


Taming The Sea

by robindrake93



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Ending, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bittersweet Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Nico di Angelo/Percy Jackson, Explicit Sexual Content, Extremely Dubious Consent, Grooming, Hurt/Comfort, Imprisonment, M/M, Minor Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson, Minor Luke Castellan/Kelli, Non-Consensual Bondage, Ownership, POV First Person, Rebirth, Stockholm Syndrome, Suicide Attempt, Underage Drinking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:15:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 11
Words: 50,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24002689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/robindrake93/pseuds/robindrake93
Summary: During his battle with Geryon, Percy's arrow misses and he loses the fight. As promised, Geryon sells him to Luke.
Relationships: Luke Castellan/Percy Jackson, Nico di Angelo/Percy Jackson
Comments: 180
Kudos: 277





	1. Betrayed

**Author's Note:**

> First of all, my fics are not for reupload. Do not reupload my fics to any website. You do not have my permission. 
> 
> Secondly, this is _not_ a percico fic. Sorry if that's what you came here for but the majority of this fic is about Percy and Luke's relationship. 
> 
> With that being said, If you'd like to read "before" then the page this fic starts on is page 158 of The Battle Of The Labyrinth. It diverges from there.
> 
> If you don't like the font color, click "Hide Creator's Style" at the top and it'll revert to black.

I had a crazy idea. I dropped Riptide and grabbed the bow off the wall. 

I was the worst archery shot in the world. I couldn’t hit the targets at Camp, much less a bull’s-eye. But I had no choice. I couldn’t win this fight with a sword. I prayed to Artemis and Apollo, the twin archers, hoping they might take pity on me for once. _Please guys. Just one shot. Please._

I notched an arrow. 

Geryon laughed. “You fool! One arrow is no better than one sword.” He raised his swords and charged. 

I dove sideways. Before he could turn, I shot my arrow. 

It missed. 

Geryon laughed harder. “They told me you couldn’t shoot!” He threw out one hand, catching me upside the head. 

I went flying across the room. The back of my head hit the corner of the coffee table and I felt cold pain in my skull. I tried to shake off the pain like I’d done countless times before but this was different… Why was the back of my head so cold? 

Geryon ambled up to me, a predator confident in its kill. He nudged my shirt up and lifted one of his swords. “Now, I can’t have you getting any more crazy ideas.” He took careful aim and then impaled the sword in my side. It went right through me and into the hardwood floor beneath me, pinning me. 

I screamed and then I lost consciousness. 

When I came to, the sun had changed position. It was lower in the sky, casting long shadows over the living room. I was so cold and so tired. What woke me up? 

Voices and footsteps. A group of people coming towards me. 

“There’s one more in the living room. Making a damn mess of my floors.” That was Geryon. His bootsteps shook the floor as he walked. 

“Is he alive?” That was Luke’s voice. 

“He’s dying,” Nico and Grover said in unison. 

Annabeth screamed. There was the sound of a struggle. “Luke, save him!” she begged. “Please, Luke, save him. Please, please, Luke. Save him. Just save him. Please.” Her voice broke and dissolved into sobs. 

“He gave me some problems,” Geryon admitted. “But he ain’t dead yet.”

Greedy bastard. 

I lifted my middle finger in his direction. 

Someone stepped on my hand and my finger snapped.

I didn’t make a single noise. My body felt so far away. 

Annabeth screamed again. Her sobs turned back into pleading. 

Tyson was yelling, struggling to get free from whoever held him. 

Even Grover put up a protest, though I could barely hear him over Annabeth and Tyson. 

I cracked my eyes open. The sword was still impaled in my side, keeping me pinned to the floor. I wasn’t sure that I would walk away from this. 

Luke squatted down next to me. I wondered if he’d been the one to break my finger. “Can you talk?” 

“No,” I said with great effort.

Time suddenly slowed down...but not for me. It slowed down for everyone else in the room. They moved with exaggerated slowness and their voices had been reduced to an indistinguishable din of background noises. 

“Are you worth saving, Percy?” 

“Are you?” I shot back.

Luke shook his head. “No.” 

My eyelids were so heavy. I closed them. Nico and Grover were right...I was dying. “Looks like you finally got your wish.” 

Luke scoffed. “You think I actually wanted you dead, Percy? You’re a good kid. Sweet and scrappy and smart. No, killing you wasn’t my idea.” 

I must have been hallucinating. That was the only explanation for what Luke was saying. This wasn’t the real Luke, it was a fantasy one. I forced my eyes to open again and felt tears roll down my cheeks. I saw Luke, blue eyes staring at me thoughtfully; and behind him were Annabeth, Grover, and Tyson frozen in the middle of fighting and screaming; and Nico, looking at me in angry horror as though pissed that I dared to die before he could kill me. 

The others suddenly caught up to our speed. It got loud in the room again. 

Luke took a canteen from his side and uncorked it. He let a few drops drip past my lips. 

I licked them, recognized the taste of nectar. It was nowhere near enough to heal me. 

“This is going to suck, kid,” Luke said to me. He stood up and put his hand on the sword hilt. “Try not to breathe too deeply.” That was said with a hint of a smile. That asshole. He knew I was dying. Breathing deeply wasn’t on the agenda. Before I could so much as take a single breath, Luke pulled the sword out of my body. 

I swear I could feel every slow slice of the blade, tearing me up from the inside, as Luke pulled it out. I arched up off the carpet with another scream that tore my throat. 

Thankfully, Luke had already gotten the sword out of my body and away from me so my wiggling didn’t impale me a second time. He tossed the sword aside without looking to see who he was going to hit, and then he knelt beside me and poured more nectar down my throat. 

This was a lot more than a couple of drops. I drained the whole canteen in a few long swallows. My broken finger healed. Various scrapes and bruises along my body vanished. Warmth didn’t flood me like it normally did when I drank nectar but I felt less cold. I could feel my insides beginning to heal themselves but I was still bleeding out and the back of my head still felt like ice. I knew I was making pathetic noises, but I honestly didn’t even hear myself. My eyes stayed on Luke. I didn’t trust him. 

My friends fell silent aside from hiccuping and sniffling. Annabeth whispered “thank you, thank you,” under her breath. 

Every eye in the room was on me, monsters and demigods alike seemed very interested in what was going to happen next. Especially now that it seemed like I wasn’t going to die. 

“Can you sit up on your own?” Luke asked me after a moment. 

There was a gross noise when I lifted my head off the carpet, kind of like someone ripping off a bandaid. 

Luke’s gaze sharpened but he waited. 

I pushed myself into a sitting position, hissing through gritted teeth. I still had two holes in my torso from the sword, the wound not even close to being healed all the way. My arms shook trying to hold my weight. My vision doubled and swam. The back of my head felt wrong and cold. If Luke wanted me to do any more than this, he’d have to give me more nectar. 

Suddenly, Nico blurted out, “Is that bone?” 

“What? Where?” Grover asked. 

“There shouldn’t be bone. Geryon didn’t hit Percy’s vital organs, let alone any bones,” Annabeth added, her voice puzzled. 

Luke didn’t take his eyes off me, not really, but he did turn his face just enough to see Nico in his peripherals. He followed Nico’s gaze to something behind me. 

Geryon scratched his middle chest with his left hand. He looked uncomfortable. “Ah, yeah. He might have, uh, hit his head while we were fighting. Didn’t think much of it. You demigods got hard heads.” 

Luke shifted so that he could pick up something where my head had been laying. He held it in front of his face for a few seconds and then shoved it in his pocket. His expression was grim. 

“Was that a piece of his skull?” Nico asked, sounding interested. 

Grover fainted on the spot, turning into a deadweight suddenly. The monster holding him nearly dropped him. 

“Luke?” Annabeth asked, fear in her voice. 

“Lean forward, Percy,” Luke said, ignoring Annabeth. 

Leaning forward hurt my abdomen but I managed a few inches without screaming. I didn’t have any fight left in me. The tremble in my hands moved to my shoulders and down my spine. My knees shook. 

Luke looked at the back of my head, calloused fingers surprisingly gentle as he moved my hair out of the way. “You got a light?” He asked, question directed to Geryon. 

Geryon picked up a lamp off a table and moved it so that Luke had light. He whistled, low and sympathetic. “Well, shit.” 

“Yeah,” Luke agreed, voice tight with anger. “Shit.” He snapped his fingers at one of the monsters. “Get me more nectar.” 

The monster hurried to do as he was told. 

Luke put the canteen to my lips. “Drink.”

Annabeth looked nervous. “Luke, he can’t drink that much at once. It’ll burn him up.” 

I swallowed down a mouthful. Warmth bloomed in my chest, finally, and spread to my limbs. My head still hurt. 

“We don’t have much choice, Annabeth.” Luke stood up. He turned to Geryon. “I’ll pay for Annabeth and Nico and as a favor, I’ll take the other two off your hands. But I’m not paying for him. He’s probably going to die and I don’t pay for corpses.”

“But he’s the most powerful one!” Geryon protested, outraged that I’d somehow managed to swindle him out of his gold. He should have gone with my deal. 

“Maybe when his skull isn’t cracked open,” Luke snapped. “He’s been lying here dying for hours. Who knows what kind of brain damage he has now.” 

“He seems fine to me,” Geryon said under his breath. 

Luke was silent for a long few moments. “Fine.” He snapped his fingers at his monsters. “Get them back to base and burn this shithole to the ground.” Luke bent down and put an arm around my waist. He hauled me to my feet. 

I’m pleased to say that I got blood all over his pristine white tank top. I wish that I could have enjoyed it more, but I felt hot and cold all at once and my body wouldn’t stop shaking. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I passed out right then. I didn’t want to let my head loll against Luke’s chest but I couldn’t keep it up. 

“WHAT?!” Geryon roared. “That’s not what we agreed to!” 

Luke shrugged the shoulder that I wasn’t leaning on. “Paying you is a courtesy because you normally deliver high quality goods. This,” Luke gave me a slight shake. “Is not high quality. If I pay you for it, you’ll think that this is acceptable. Taking what I want is so much easier.” 

Geryon stood staring at Luke with absolute hatred. Pulsing veins stuck out in his forehead and arms. After a long few moments, he said, “Fine! You’re right. He ain’t gonna live no matter who his daddy is. But, pay me for the other two and I’ll throw in two extra red steers. Nico’s a high quality demigod. Real powerful once he’s trained.”

Luke didn’t say anything. 

“Ten! Ten extra steers on top of your usual order,” Geryon said. He looked nervous, desperate. Luke must have been a pretty big client because losing his business seemed like the last thing Geryon wanted. 

“Fine. Someone pay the man for those two and make sure we get our extra meat.” Luke had to practically drag me out of the ranch house. Even though I’d grown a lot in the past three years, Luke didn’t seem to have much trouble with me. He was still taller, broader, and he looked unnaturally healthy. 

“Luke,” I mumbled as he carried me down the steps. “Imma pass out.” It was all the warning I could give him before my eyes rolled back into my skull and everything went black.

The second time I woke, it was with a fever like nothing I’d ever felt before. I was drenched in sweat, clothes soaked with it. It felt like my skin was on fire where it touched the mattress I laid on and even the parts that should have been cooled by the breeze, felt too hot. My mouth was dry, my muscles ached. When I opened my eyes, the gems in the black ceiling seemed to spin as though they were chasing each other.

I moaned and closed my eyes as a wave of nausea rippled through me. I wanted to move, to find the cool side of the pillow, to faceplant in a pile of snow, but I couldn’t make my limbs work. I panted and moaned and cried for some sort of relief but it didn’t come. 

I’m not sure how long I was conscious - it felt like forever - but eventually someone came. When hands touched me, I screamed in equal parts pain and terror. The points of contact were agony, too hot, so hot that I felt like it was going to be burned into my skin. My eyes couldn’t focus on anything long enough to figure out if the person touching me was a human or a monster. I didn’t care. I just wanted them to leave me alone so that I could suffer and die alone. 

Whoever had come wasn’t deterred by my scream or the groans of agony that followed. They picked me up, one arm beneath my knees and the other beneath my neck. I was lifted off the bed and that was nice for all of three seconds, until the places our bodies touched became hotter and hotter. 

I was sure that if I lived through this, I’d come out the other side with someone else’s hands branded all over my body. 

Suddenly, I was in the water. It was a pool of cold saltwater. When I was lowered into it, I could imagine that the heat from my body turned the saltwater into billowing steam. Thinking of that was nicer than thinking of how much pain I was in, so I thought more about delicate steam caressing my skin. I closed my eyes and fell into unconsciousness once more.


	2. Trapped

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's only Sunday, but I have a long shift at work followed by physical therapy tomorrow so I'm not sure that I'll be up to posting on Monday. Better early than late, right?

I opened my eyes to find that I was still underwater. The lighting was strange, green and flickering. Other than those hints of green, everything seemed to be made of white veined black marble. I’d seen it once before in the Underworld but I didn’t think that’s where I was. 

Of course, the last two times I’d been conscious, I was hovering pretty close to death so maybe I really was dead. 

I sat up, breached the surface of the water, and took my first breath of air in who knows how long. The air was so cold that I broke into goosebumps. Now that I was sitting up, I took the opportunity to look around a bit more. I was in a luxurious bathroom made entirely of black marble. It was the size of my mom’s two bedroom apartment. The ceiling was high above me and dotted with diamonds the size of apples. 

The bathtub I was in was shaped like a slipper and could have easily fit two other people. A stack of towels waited on a stone table next to my bathtub. On the floor in front of my bathtub was an animal skin rug that looked a little like a black jaguar except it had two heads and no rosettes. Behind me was an enormous window, stained glass design showing off a beautifully rendered image of an old titan of the oceans dwarfing a ship. I could almost feel the terror of the crew aboard the ship, knowing that they wouldn’t make it out of this storm. 

There were two showers with glass doors, another tub set into the floor, and huge vanity mirrors that stood from floor to ceiling. By the sunken tub was a bench carved out of the wall, decorated with throw pillows that were gold, embroidered with white thread that showed images of monsters eating people. The wall had three huge, bench-to-ceiling stained glass windows that depicted magnificent gardens where the plants ate people. Three sinks graced another wall, each with ample counter space between them, and I could see the edge of a vanity peeking through a hallway. Decorative glass jars filled with Greek fire sat on their own alcoves and shelves around the room. 

Before I could do much more than take in the immense wealth around me, I heard footsteps coming. They were soft but there was no other sound to mask them. 

I ducked beneath the surface of the water and laid still. 

A shadow passed over me briefly, then vanished. 

I didn’t have to hold my breath beneath the water because I could breathe as well as I could on dry land. So I waited, five minutes, then ten minutes. Slowly, cautiously, I sat up again. The water of the tub was nearly at the rim and I peered over the edge with just my eyes above the water. 

I spotted Luke immediately. His tawny skin stood out like a sore thumb among all the black in the bathroom. He reclined in the sunken tub, facing the window, head tipped back so that the long column of his throat was exposed. Luke’s eyes were closed, body posture relaxed like he didn’t have a care in the world. 

I slipped out of the bathtub without making a single sound. The water didn’t even ripple. Not a drop of water rolled off me and onto the cold marble floor. It was very very cold outside of the tub, so cold that I began shivering as soon as the air touched my skin. I grabbed one of the towels, winced at the soft sound of the plush towel moving, and wrapped it around myself. It was so big that it was like a cloak around my shoulders. And it was heated, thank the gods. The rug cat _looked_ dead but I’d learned my lesson with godly things and I skirted around it, avoiding the two mouths. 

Suddenly it felt like I was trying to move through molasses. 

“Where, exactly, do you think you’re going to go, Percy?” Luke asked me without opening his eyes. His head was still tipped back and from where I stood parallel to him, I could see the white streak in his hair. A momento from holding up the sky. I had an identical one in my hair. “There are guards outside the door, sharp of ear and sharper of claw. And beyond them are _more_ guards, the entirety of Kronos’ army, actually. They’ve heard stories about your feats and most of them are itching to kill you themselves to move up through the ranks. You don’t have a weapon, you don’t even have _clothes._ Are you going to fight Kronos’ army naked?” 

“I-if I have to,” I said, voice cracking and breaking from disuse. How long was I out of it? 

Luke gave an amused snort. Time went back to normal. “You could try the window,” he pointed lazily to the wall with the stained glass. “Except we’re thousands of feet above the ground, well in Zeus’ territory, and the glass doesn’t break.” 

I looked at the windows desperately. It was difficult to see beyond them and at first I thought that was because of the colored panes of glass but then I realized it was because there was nothing to see except endless gray sky. We really were high up. 

“At least your cage is pretty,” Luke told me. He opened his eyes and looked at me upside down, though he didn’t make any other move. 

I wrapped the towel tighter around my shoulders and tried to come up with a plan. This could be my chance to kill him and end all of this. If Luke was letting time flow normally then he didn’t consider me a serious threat. Considering how many times I’d beaten him, I didn’t really like that he wasn’t taking me seriously now. Just because Geryon hadn’t honored our deal, didn’t mean I was beaten. 

I felt a tug in my gut and the water in the sunken tub rose to submerge Luke. I ran, out of the bathroom and down a hallway. There was an open door that led to a side room but I skidded past it. At the end of the short hallway, I found myself in a cavernous room, even bigger than the bathroom. Because I wasn’t focused on the water anymore, it rolled off me and I slipped. Windows to my right, doors to my left. I scrambled for the doors. 

They weren’t locked. In hindsight, that should have been a red flag. 

I threw open the doors and ran directly into a hellhound. 

The hellhound yelped with surprise but recovered quickly. It saw me and I could swear that it grinned. It bayed a victory and then twisted to take a huge bite at me. 

I prepared to dive out of the way but my wet feet slipped on the floor again. I fell hard onto my knees. 

The hellhound froze seconds before it took a bite out of my face, jaws open and sharp teeth dripping with saliva. As I watched, the hellhound shrank from a monstrous beast to a fluffy little puppy and then into a small pink thing and finally it blipped out of existence. 

From down the hall, I heard the sound of nails clicking on the tile and the huff of excited breaths. More hellhounds were on the way to see what the first one had found. 

Luke pulled me back into the room and slammed the door shut. The lock clicked shut. 

I kicked Luke in the shin and ran again. There was nowhere to go except back to the bathroom. My heart pounded rabbit fast; I was prey and I was being hunted. Luke didn’t even need to touch me to hurt me and that was terrifying. 

There was nothing I could use as a weapon in the bathroom. Towels, pillows, nothing else except my fists. The water had been drained from the tub. I could probably explode a pipe, maybe. But the floors were made of hard marble and I was pretty sure they wouldn’t crack that easily. I grabbed a pillow off the bench, kept my back to the window and the sunken tub between me and Luke. 

I blinked and Luke suddenly stood in front of me. A chill crept its way down my spine. I knew that Luke was so fast he could speedblitz any water defense, that he could literally walk on air, and that Backbiter could help him teleport. But Luke didn’t have Backbiter right now and I hadn’t heard him coming. 

Luke looked bored, maybe even a little annoyed. “Next time you try that, I’m going to let you get eaten.” His expression hardened. “It isn’t safe for you outside of my room.” 

This was his room? This whole giant cavern of a space was just for him? Against my will, I looked around again. It was beautiful but it was also cold and lonely. I couldn’t feel my toes. “Let me go.” 

Luke rolled his eyes. “Do we really have to go through this?” He put his hands on his hips and the action drew my attention south. He was still naked, which made sense since he’d been bathing, but I could count the number of naked men I’d seen on one hand and it began and ended with the one right in front of me. 

My face heated with a blush. I snapped my gaze back to his face and clutched the throw pillow tighter. 

“What are you going to do with that?” Luke snapped. He made an angry gesture with one hand. “Even if you managed to get past me, there are thousands of monsters wandering the halls. As you saw. And in case you didn’t get the memo, you’re on Mount Othrys, Percy. Ninety percent of the army is here.” 

A breeze blew through the bathroom like the air conditioning just turned on. I hugged the pillow to my chest against the cold. What was I going to do? There was always trying to appeal to Luke’s better nature by talking to him...but that had _never_ worked in the past. I’d spent the last three years being unable to talk Luke out of anything that he wanted to do. I swallowed. “So, what are you going to do with me?” 

Luke’s gaze was contemplative. His shoulders visibly dropped and until that moment, I hadn’t realized how tense he was. “Dunno,” Luke said finally. “Kronos didn’t think you would live. You OD’d on nectar and before that you were having seizures because of the hole in your skull.” 

Without thinking, I reached up to tentatively feel the back of my head. There was a tiny little scar, less than an inch long. It probably wasn’t even visible through my hair. But it definitely felt like there was bone beneath my fingers. Was he lying? Luke might withhold information but he’d never outright lied to me before. 

Luke gave me a tight, amused smile. “I put your skull back together before giving you the nectar.” His smile turned sly. “Makes the Minotaur look like nothing, huh?” 

I got the strangest feeling that he was trying to relate to me somehow by bringing up Camp. He wasn’t doing a very good job of it, though. “Were you trying to make me overdose?” I asked. 

Luke’s smile faded, his face going oddly blank. “Not really.” His eyes drifted away from me but I knew he was still watching my every move. “I knew you’d run a fever because of the dosage but if I didn’t exceed the recommended dose, you’d have died at best and lived with brain damage for the rest of your life at worst.” 

It didn’t make sense that Luke would try to save my life. He spent so much time trying to kill me. The logical thing to do would have been to let me die from my wounds or even to let me turn into a drooling, stupid vegetable. Luke would have stayed in Annabeth’s good graces too, since it was very clearly Geryon who was the cause of it. Of course, Luke was the reason that Geryon had tried to sell us in the first place but I didn’t think Annabeth would really care about that part. “I’m not saying thank you,” I told him. 

That small, amused smile was back. “Of course not.” 

“You didn’t answer my question,” I accused. If they were going to torture me, then I wanted them to get it over with. 

Luke just looked at me. 

I adjusted the towel to cover more of me but all of the heat had been sucked out of it. It was so cold in here. How could he just stand there like it didn’t even touch him? I covered my toes with my other foot in an attempt to warm them, and shivered again. 

Luke sighed. He crooked a finger at me and turned heel, walking out of the bathroom. He was still very naked. 

I was _not_ staring at his ass. But if I was, and I _wasn’t_ , I might say that it was a very nice ass. Sculpted, was the word that came to mind. Anyway, I followed after Luke because I didn’t really want to stay naked in the bathroom and I hoped that he would lead me to clothes and food and, most importantly, my friends. “Where are my friends?” 

“Annabeth is safe,” Luke said as he led me down the hallway and into the side room I’d noticed before. This room held nothing but racks of clothes, shelves of shoes, and jewelry displays. A backless couch was in the center of the room and every wall not taken up by clothes featured floor-to-ceiling mirrors. In front of those mirrors were shorter mirrors set into the floor. The Aphrodite kids would kill for this closet. 

There were clothes for every occasion; formal suits, casual jeans and t-shirts, business casual slacks and sweaters, chitons of every color and length. And then there were some _other_ things that made me feel weird looking at them. Things made of leather, lace, or silk. I couldn’t specifically tell what they were but some were scrappy bits of fabric that barely clung to the hangers and others were elaborate outfits. I decidedly did not focus on those. 

Once I got over my shock at the room, Luke’s words sank in. It was something of a relief to know that Annabeth was safe, though I was pretty sure that Luke and I had different definitions of safe. “What about Nico, Grover, and Tyson?” 

“Nico escaped a few days ago,” Luke said. He picked out a pair of black slacks and a sky blue button up shirt, then began getting dressed. “At least, we _think_ he escaped. He could just be invisible, wandering around, but no one has been able to pick up his scent.” Luke said this casually, as though he didn’t care one way or another. 

Did Luke know who Nico was? No, I decided. He’d probably put more effort into finding him if he did. “What about Grover and Tyson?” I pushed along what used to be my link to Grover but I couldn’t feel him. There was nothing on the other end of our empathy link. Fear twisted my stomach into knots. “What did you do to them?” I demanded, unable to keep my emotion out of my voice. 

Luke spared me a glance as he buttoned his shirt. “They didn’t make it,” Luke said once he was dressed. His eyes were such a vibrant blue that they made the shirt look washed out and faded. 

“What do you mean they didn’t make it?” My voice was sharp and cold like icicles. 

“They’re dead,” Luke told me. “Killed shortly before we arrived on Mount Othrys. That’s the trouble with traveling with monsters. They can’t control themselves around prey animals and, well, the cyclops got in the way. Glad I didn’t pay for them.”

Anger welled up inside me so quickly that my vision went red. “You killed them!” I shouted. I must have attacked Luke because the next thing I knew, I was on my back. There was nothing physically holding me down, nothing I could see, but I couldn’t get up and I knew it was Luke’s doing. 

Luke wasn’t hurting me, just holding me down while I screamed and thrashed on the floor. Only after I’d worn myself out, did Luke relieve the invisible pressure on me. He went back to the rack, selecting a pale blue chiton, calm as could be. 

I lay on the floor, panting. My anger was being swallowed up by sorrow. My best friend, my half-brother. They were dead. Dead, dead, dead. Killed by monsters, killed by Luke. I wished that I was back in the saltwater bath, that I’d never come out of it, that I’d died too. I curled up on my side, towel still wrapped around me, and pulled it up to my face to hide my face while I cried. I couldn’t stop the tears but I wasn’t going to give Luke the satisfaction of actually seeing them. 

Luke didn’t let me cry in peace for long. Invisible hands hauled me to my feet then dragged me to the couch. I was propped up on one of the sides when it became clear that I wasn’t going to sit up on my own. The invisible hands dressed me, pulling the chiton over my head, belting it, and adjusting it so that it hung properly. 

Let me tell you, it’s beyond weird to be touched by something you can’t see. Especially when you know the dude responsible for it is standing a few feet away, staring at you. The casual use of telekinesis was unnerving. Luke had done it in front of me before, but now he was so much better at it. Was that because of spending so much time around Kronos? 

I tried to keep hiding my face in the towel, but that was taken from me. Fine. If Luke wanted to see me cry, then what did I care? My breath came in jagged pants and tears streamed down my cheeks. I didn’t bother to brush them away. 

“I’m sorry about this,” Luke said. Time slowed down for me but Luke moved like normal. 

I could only follow him with my eyes. 

From a drawer, Luke pulled out a long length of black rope. He moved my hands behind my back and began to tie them. It was the first time that Luke had actually touched me, skin-to-skin, and part of me was surprised that his hands were still calloused. One tie went around my wrists, another just below my elbow, and a third above my elbow. Then he moved around to my front and began to make what I could only describe as an elaborate harness out of the remaining rope. 

When my arms were successfully bound, Luke turned his attention to my legs. Now that I could see what he was doing, I saw that the knots he was making were super elaborate. The effect was reminiscent of a mermaid’s tail. It was, well, sort of pretty to look at. It would have been prettier if it wasn’t keeping my legs tied together from ankle to knee. 

Time returned to normal.

I tested my bonds, flexed to find that there wasn’t much give. I struggled against the ropes but I was caught so good that I couldn’t wiggle my way out at all. No amount of scratching at the rope helped, either. It was soft against my skin - for being rope - but it was strong. There was no way that I was going anywhere. At least not without more time. 

Luke stepped back and looked at me. There was something in his eye, something about the way his gaze traveled over his work, that made me nervous. “Can’t have you running away again,” Luke said, though I hadn’t asked him anything. 

I realized immediately that I wouldn’t be able to stand, let alone walk. Was he just going to leave me in this room on this fainting couch? What if I rolled off of it? Would he leave me on the floor? 

Luke picked me up, threw me over his shoulder like a sack of flour. 

I gave a very manly and indignant squeak of surprise. 

Luke carried me out of the closet and into the main room, three times as big as the bathroom had been. It was a bedroom and a sitting room. There was a huge bed in the center of the room, unattached to any walls. The sheets were black. Stained glass windows took up one entire wall, each showing a different natural disaster - typhoon, thunderstorm, tornado, wildfire - and people dying with expressions of surprised agony. In one corner was the sitting room, plush chairs set around an elaborate fireplace that glowed with Greek fire. Obsidian statues of monsters and mythical beasts decorated the space. 

Luke set me down on a rug that ran the length of the windowed wall. The rug looked like an enormous mouth, with sharp fangs pointing towards me. 

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the rug tried to eat me, but thankfully, it seemed to be just a rug. My stomach growled. “Are you going to feed me?” I asked, hoping that the answer would be yes. I also wanted to be alone with my grief. 

Luke sighed as though I was really a pain in the ass. He left the room without answering. The large door boomed shut behind him and I was finally alone. 

Naturally, I struggled against the ropes some more. But Luke had done a good job of tying me up. When it became clear that I was only going to hurt myself trying to get out, I scooted a couple of feet towards the window. First, I kicked at it with my feet but there wasn’t a whole lot of momentum with them bound. The window held. I was sure that throwing one of those chairs through it would do something more useful. 

For now, though, I wanted to look out the window more than break it. We were so high up that I could see clouds. They were thick and gray, blocking out the sun, but lit up with the occasional flash of lightning. I got the feeling that they were making it rain but we were mostly above the clouds so I couldn’t tell for sure. This was definitely Zeus’ territory and though the height scared me, I didn’t think that Zeus actually, well, _owned_ this piece of sky. The God of Thunder wouldn’t be coming to my rescue. 

The palace was cold, even with all of the Greek fire around. Every few minutes, I’d get a chill like the AC just turned on. Being in the huge black room, defenseless and surrounded by enemies, was scary. And of course, my grief over Grover and Tyson didn’t diminish in the slightest. I missed them so much. I would have given anything to turn back the clock, to trade my life for theirs. 

My only hope was that Nico and Annabeth were alive. I assumed that she was being held here too, since this is where Kronos’ army was based. Annabeth was smart. She could escape her cell, rescue me, and we would be out of here and laughing about this over smoothies in a few hours. And after we were out of this shadowy hell, I was going to kill Geryon. That son of a bitch sold us to Luke and that wasn’t going to stand. 

Against my best efforts, I was asleep when Luke came back. I wasn’t dying anymore, felt pretty much healed, but my body had been through a lot and now my emotions were in shambles. I lost the battle with sleep and fell asleep on my side on the rug. 

Luke walked into the room with a plate of something that smelled so delicious I nearly drooled. In his other hand was a glass of water. He set them down in the sitting area and then walked over to me and picked me up off the floor. Luke sat me down on one of the chairs by the fireplace and kneeled in front of me. “If I untie your hands, are you going to be good or do I need to feed you myself?” 

There was no way in hell that Luke was going to hand feed me like a child. “You can untie me,” I said. I wasn’t going to promise to be good. 

Luke narrowed his eyes. Then he stood and moved around behind me. The rope around my arms slowly loosened...but not the harness around my chest. Whatever. At least I could eat now. When he was done, Luke sat down in the chair opposite me. He didn’t have a plate for himself, which made me nervous. 

What if it was drugged? I looked down at my plate. There were mashed potatoes with butter and melted cheese, wedges of peach with juice that mixed with the juice from the thin slices of red meat, mushrooms sauteed in a buttery garlic sauce, and a fluffy golden biscuit, drizzled with honey. It smelled so good and I was so hungry. I swallowed, rubbed my sore arms, and didn’t touch the food. 

“Eat it, Percy. It isn’t poisoned,” Luke said after a few minutes of nothing. 

I hadn’t even considered poison. Luke wouldn’t have tried to keep me alive just to kill me with poison. Not when he could have let my injuries or the nectar kill me. “Is it drugged?” I blurted out. 

A look of surprise crossed Luke’s face. “No.” 

“Why aren’t you eating anything?” 

Luke rolled his eyes. “Why do you think I was gone so long? I ate in the dining room.” 

That seemed like a sensible place to eat. But… I shrugged. “This place is so big that I figured the walk to the kitchen and back must take a long time.” 

Luke’s lips twitched in a smile. “Not if you walk fast.” He gestured to my food once more. “Eat, Percy. You haven’t had real food in two weeks.” 

_“Two weeks?!”_ I yelped. It had been two weeks since Luke bought us? That was so long. Where were Annabeth and Nico? Why hadn’t they broken me out of here by now? Why hadn’t Annabeth escaped herself?

“Percy,” Luke growled. 

My hand was shaking when I picked up my fork. I considered trying to stab Luke with it, but I didn’t think my aim would be very accurate. All I was likely to do was annoy him. He’d given me a knife too, which seemed like a stupid move since I could stab him with that a lot more accurately than with a fork. I lifted my gaze. 

Luke was looking at me like he was reading my mind. 

I dropped my gaze back to my plate and slowly cut my meat into bite-sized pieces. The first bite of that red meat was heaven on my tongue. It was so delicious that I actually moaned. After that, I cleaned my plate quickly. It was like I couldn’t get enough once I’d had that first bite. The rest of the food was good but it was nothing like that meat. I’d never tasted anything so incredible. I used the biscuit to mop up the juices and barely resisted licking my plate clean once I’d run out of biscuit. I drained the water in a few gulps. It was icy cold going down but it sated my thirst. 

As soon as I was done, Luke got up and cleared my plate away, including the fork and knife. He balanced it in one hand and reached into his pocket with the other. In his hand, he held a can of coca-cola. He set it where the plate had been. “That’s for being good.” Then, Luke walked away with the dirty dishes. 

I looked at the can of coke, reached out to touch it. It was cold to the touch. I was suddenly very thirsty. Coke was my weakness and Luke knew it; he’d exploited it before. I popped the tab and listened to the fizz of carbonation. I glanced at Luke, who was putting the dishes into some hidden alcove in the wall. Then I lifted the can to my lips and took my first drink. 

Heaven.

Luke let me finish my coke before he tied up my arms again. He carried me back to the rug beside the window and set me down on the floor. “I’ll be back later,” he said. And then he was gone again. 

And I was alone again. 

By the time Luke returned, night had fallen and I really, really had to pee. Luke must have seen it on my face because he just untied my legs and hauled me to my feet. He freed my arms and pointed me to the bathroom. “Past the tubs,” he told me. 

I was surprised and grateful that he let me go to the bathroom by myself. On the walk there, I looked for anything that could be used as a weapon. But aside from the Greek fire, there was nothing that would do more than irritate him. My chiton didn’t have pockets or folds to hide things in anyway. It occured to me that that was probably the reason I was wearing this. No pockets meant Riptide wouldn’t appear. 

I did my business, cleaned up, and slowly walked back to the bedroom. There was nowhere else to go and Luke would find me in any case. There was nowhere to hide. 

Luke sat on his bed, weaving the black rope between his fingers while he waited for me. He looked up when I entered. 

Something about the scene made me freeze in the doorway. Going near him felt dangerous. 

In a few long strides, Luke closed the space between us. The rope was still in his hands. 

I didn’t want to be tied up again. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want him to touch me again. I bolted back the way I’d come. Too late, I remembered that you aren’t supposed to run away from predators; it triggers their prey drive. 

Luke chased after me.

I locked myself in the toilet room. There was nowhere to go from here. I could try drowning myself in toilet water but I wasn’t sure how well that would actually work. I could use the water as a shield or a weapon. Could I kill him with it? Maybe if I got it into his lungs. I still hadn’t come up with a plan when the lock on the door clicked open. 

My heart thundered in my chest. A strange sort of terror filled me, one I wasn’t really familiar with but it tasted like the same fear I’d wake up with whenever Gabe hit me so hard that I’d black out. It was not the same sort of fear I felt when encountering monsters. 

Luke caught me. Of course he did. He dragged me out into the main bathroom.

I yelled as loud as I could, I kicked and scratched at him. I tried to wiggle free but Luke just kept dragging me back to him. 

Luke wrangled me into submission. He could have stopped time, he could have used telekinesis, he could have just punched me into unconsciousness. But he didn’t. As Luke tied the ropes again, his message was loud and clear: he didn’t need to resort to extreme violence or titan tricks to get control over me. He was breathing a little harder than before, but not by much. I didn’t even wear him out. 

Somehow, that just made it worse when I was finally tied up again. 

I lay with my face pressed into the cold marble floor and glared at him from the corner of my eye. 

“You know,” Luke said as he dragged me across the floor by the rope harness around my chest. “I could put you in the dungeon, let the monsters have you. They’re thirsting for your blood. The only thing stopping them from coming in here and killing you is me. So think about that, next time you decide to be a brat.” He left me in front of the window again. “I mean, I’ve treated you pretty well, haven’t I?”

I didn’t answer. Was Luke really the only thing standing between me and a nasty death? Considering all the times he’d tried to kill me, it didn’t seem likely. Then again...then again, he did nurse me back to health after Geryon. And he did...do that thing to the hellhound before it could hurt me. It didn’t matter. I still had to escape. I had to rescue Annabeth and track down Nico again. 

Luke sighed. He turned his back on me, walked to his bed and this time he didn’t use long strides. When he reached the bed, he began stripping, stripped until he was naked again. Then he slid between the sheets and laid with his back to me. 

If I had a weapon, I could stab Luke to death in his sleep. As it was, there was nothing in the room that I’d found to use and I was still bound tightly. Even scooting across the floor was hard, and made my chest and shoulders hurt. Actually, just sitting here doing nothing was kind of uncomfortable. There was one more problem with my Stab Luke To Death plan. 

Death didn’t really stick when it came to Luke. Kronos could just rewind time for him, bring him back to life, and then I would be in big trouble.


	3. Dehydrated

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy is punished further.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet you guys thought I forgot. 
> 
> By the by, I made a [ so check that out if you wanna know his entire canon life story.](https://luke-x-percy.tumblr.com/post/618510500108648448/the-life-of-luke-castellan)

  
The sun didn’t touch Mount Orthys. Hours later, the black sky lightened to gray but the clouds continued to hide the sun. Dawn brought no warmth with it. 

Sleep had been an elusive thing. It was too cold and I’d spent most of the night curled up on the floor shivering as the cold set into my bones. I felt like I would never be warm again. I was cold and stiff as a corpse but unlike a corpse, my body ached with stiffness from sleeping on the floor. My left foot tingled. 

Pushing myself from laying on my side to sitting on my ass was a lot harder than the reverse had been, but when I finally sat up, I saw that Luke was gone. Either he was in the bathroom or the closet, but he wasn’t in the bedroom. Though I hadn’t been asleep, I didn’t even hear him get up.

Luke returned shortly after I woke, carrying a plate of food that made my stomach growl. I could see that it was stacked full of fruit-stuffed pancakes drizzled with syrup, fluffy yellow eggs, and thick slices of bacon. The glass he carried was full of orange juice that smelled so strong I could taste it’s sweetness from ten feet. Luke set the food down in the sitting area...and then he began to eat it.

I blinked, surprised. Wasn’t he going to give it to me? Wasn’t he going to feed me? “Hey,” I said, “you gonna share that?”

Luke put a piece of pancake in his mouth. He looked up as though just noticing I was there. “No,” he said bluntly. “You misbehave and you don’t eat.” 

My stomach rumbled a protest. My mouth pooled with saliva. I wanted to eat and I wanted these ropes off. After a few minutes of watching him eat, I scooted so that my back was to Luke. It was a little bit better. At least I didn’t have to see what I was missing out on, though I could still smell it.

I wasn’t misbehaving. Trying to escape wasn’t misbehaving. Luke had bought me and brought me to a place that I didn’t want to be. Geryon wouldn’t have tried to sell us if Luke hadn’t been buying demigods. I frowned as I stared out the window. No, Luke didn’t even buy me. I was worth so little to him that he couldn’t be bothered to pay for me. I’d been kidnapped. Yeah, that was it. And it was natural for kidnapping victims to try to escape. 

When he finished eating breakfast, Luke left me alone again. I guess it made sense that he couldn’t watch me all the time. He was an essential part of Kronos’ army and I was sure that it took a lot of work to make sure everything was going according to plan. From what I’d seen in the past, Luke didn’t have very good control over his monster army. 

I hoped they ate him. 

Then again, if they did, I would be left here alone and vulnerable. 

Maybe just a maiming, then. 

Being awake and alone, tied up in a room, was boring. My boredom grew quickly. There was nothing to do. 

I struggled to get out of my bindings. That involved a lot of wriggling around and grunting. I even tried to chew them off but the closest ropes - the ones on my shoulders - were set so that I could only graze them with my teeth. I couldn’t get a good grip no matter how much I shifted my shoulders. All I got for my struggles was ropeburn. 

After that, I decided to look around the room. I had to scoot around on my butt. And let me tell you, once I was off the rug, the marble floors were freezing. It was like ice against my skin. My balls tucked up so high, I wasn’t sure they’d ever drop down again. There was nothing I could see in the room except for the statues, which freaked me out with how lifelike they looked. No weapons, no personal items, no books, not even any paintings on the walls. The only breaks in the rooms were the stained glass windows and those pillows in the bathroom. When I was done looking around the suite, I returned to my spot on the rug and shivered. 

I was so cold. The breeze kicked up again and I gritted my teeth against the chill. 

I’ll admit that I cried a little bit more. I threw a pity party for myself and cried about my situation, about my dead friends, about Annabeth still locked up somewhere in this horrible palace. And my mom. She didn’t even know where I was. She would be so worried about me. I wished I was with her, I wished she would wrap her arms around me and talk in that soothing voice of hers about how her day at the candy store went. I could listen to my mom tell stories for hours. 

The tears on my cheeks were like ice in the cold room. Crying hadn’t helped, only worn me out even more. 

I napped, although I didn’t want to. There just wasn’t anything else to do. I had nightmares that the statues came alive and tried to eat me. 

When I woke, Luke was still gone and I had a pressing issue to take care of. It wasn’t my hunger, although I’d have liked to be able to take care of that too. I really, really needed the toilet. 

Even though I had no idea how I was going to use the toilets, I inched my way towards them anyway. There was a line that I refused to cross and it was going to the bathroom on the floor. I wasn’t some untrained dog or a little kid who didn’t know any better. And I was almost one hundred percent sure that if I made a mess, Luke would kill me. Maybe even let me starve to death. 

Figuring out how to use the toilet on my own, while still tied up, was sort of humiliating. Luckily, Luke wasn’t there to witness my struggle. For one thing, standing up was hard. My balance was totally off and I fell more than once. For another thing, the chiton I wore went down to my knees and I had to gather the fabric up and out of the way from behind my back. It kept slipping out of my hands. 

Two more problems arose rather quickly. Normally when I peed, I had my hands to aim. But they were currently tied behind my back, holding up wads of fabric. I wound up sitting down to pee, which was humiliating all on its own. I was a dude! I shouldn’t have to sit down to pee. The second problem was that there was no toilet paper. Like, at all. I’ve never been a neat freak but even I have standards when it comes to personal hygiene. Thankfully, I figured that problem out too. 

The bathroom had a bidet. I silently sent a prayer of thanks to Annabeth and her obsession with design and architecture, because without her I wouldn’t have known what a bidet was or how to use it. 

Once that humiliating experience was over, I went back into the bathing portion of the bathroom. I sat on the cold floor - far away from that cat rug because its beady eyes seemed to be looking hungrily at me - and studied the stained glass windows. How did Luke know that the glass wouldn’t break? Did he try to throw someone out of the window only to have them bounce off? I laughed, though it wasn’t funny.

Boredom quickly took over again. I started counting the number of Greek fire lanterns. Twenty-four. That seemed like a lot but they didn’t give off the best lighting. The room still looked like a constant twilight, though it was a very green one. 

The lighting outside shifted and darkened. Luke still wasn’t back. I was colder now that it was getting dark. And I was lonely. I’d never been alone for this long in my life. There was always a roommate a few feet over or a parent across the hall or an entire camp just outside my door. All there was here were monsters roaming the halls and they didn’t bring me any comfort. 

I pulled the sheet off Luke’s bed with my teeth and dragged it across the floor to my spot on the rug. I had to roll myself up like a burrito to cover every part of my body but once I did, I felt better. A little more secure, a little bit warmer. The sheet was silky smooth and seemed to glide against my skin. The thread count had to be really high. I lay facing the window, looking through a pane of blue glass at a sky that held nothing. 

The sky outside was black by the time Luke came back in. He didn’t have food with him. 

I rolled over and watched him from my spot on the floor.

Luke stripped out of his clothes, leaving a trail from the door to the bathroom. He didn’t look at me even once. His shoulders were stooped and there was something dark on his hands. Luke disappeared into the bathroom and a few seconds later, I heard the running of water. The water shut off a few minutes later, leaving the suite in a deeper silence than before. Luke’s sigh of relief reached me.

After that, I didn’t hear anything else for twenty, thirty, forty minutes. Then the shifting of water and soft, wet footsteps on the marble floor. Luke came out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist. He went to his bed, paused, looked at it. 

The comforter was half on the floor. I figured he would get mad if I took that but surely he couldn’t fault me for taking his sheet. I gripped the sheet tight in my fists, hoping he wouldn’t take it from me. 

Luke looked over at me for the first time, as though he’d forgotten that I was there. A debate played out on his face. With a shake of his hips, Luke let the towel fall. He picked up the comforter, brought it to his shoulders like a cape, and then fell onto the bed. 

“You’re really not going to feed me?” My voice was loud in the silent room. 

A growl came from the bed. 

“But I’m hungry,” I whined. No matter what the circumstances, I’d always managed to find food before. Or someone would take pity on me and feed me. “And thirsty.”

Another growl. 

I didn’t know a lot about Luke’s past, but I did know that he’d run away from home at nine years old and that he’d been on the streets until he came to Camp Half-Blood at age fourteen. Luke had to know what it was like to be hungry. “Why would you starve me? _You’ve_ gone hungry.”

“Percy, I swear to the gods that if you don’t shut up, I’m going to shut you up,” Luke threatened me. 

How would he do that? “You’re a dick.”

The comforter flew back dramatically. The next second, Luke was out of bed.

I might have flinched a little bit. 

But Luke wasn’t walking towards me. He went into another room. I could hear him, not talking, but growling. It sounded unbroken, like he didn’t have to pause for breath between growls. Then he was stalking towards me, something in his hands. He knotted the middle of it and crouched in front of me. His muscles rippled as he forced me to sit. Luke didn’t ask me to open my mouth, he squeezed the hinges and my jaws opened for him. 

I made a noise in the back of my throat and tried to bite him. 

Luke shoved the knotted thing - fabric - into my mouth and tied it securely around the back of my head. Then he got up, walked back to the bed, flopped dramatically onto it, and pulled the comforter over his head. 

I struggled with the gag in my mouth. It forced my tongue to lay still, which I didn’t like. And it tasted weird, which I also didn’t like. The corners of my mouth hurt because it was tied so tight around my head. I couldn’t even close my lips around it. I knew immediately that this thing was going to make my drooling problem even worse. Well, once it soaked up all the saliva in my mouth, it would. I was immediately thirsty. 

I growled and struggled to get it off my head and out of my mouth. Luke had tied it tight. I growled again, struggled, tried to swallow and choked, tried to cough and wound up falling over. I tried everything I could think of to remove the gag. I rubbed my head against my shoulders, against the floor. I tried pushing it out with my tongue. I tried biting through it and then grinding it between my teeth. Nothing was working. 

Luke didn’t seem bothered by my struggling like he’d been bothered by my voice. He didn’t growl or threaten me for the rest of the night. 

By the time Luke woke up, I was laying on the floor, staring at nothing. I was tired and everything hurt a lot worse than before my struggle with the gag. My shoulders stung and I was pretty sure I’d rubbed them raw between the floor and the rope but I couldn’t see. My stomach hurt because it was empty and it clawed at me like a beast. Sometimes the hunger pangs would go away but when they returned, they returned with a vengeance. 

Luke wasn’t just withholding food, he also wasn’t giving me anything to drink. Yesterday wasn’t too bad but today my head throbbed with pain and my throat was parched. 

So here’s the thing. Dehydration sucks for everyone but it _especially_ sucks for children of Poseidon. We _need_ more water than the average person; drinking, bathing, if there’s a way to consume water then we need it. 

Luke walked over to me, still naked. He was worse than an Apollo kid because at least they wore pants. Luke nudged me with his foot. 

My growl was less a growl and more a rasp. I glared up at him. 

Luke smiled sweetly down at me. Then he went to get dressed. He wore camouflage cargo pants, a white tank top, and shiny black boots. He left the room without saying a word to me. 

He brought food with him when he returned but like yesterday, he sat down in his chair and ate it in clear view of me. Luke completely ignored me.

But I couldn’t ignore him. I really wanted to eat something. I’d take scraps if he’d give them to me. Two days without a meal and I was already considering scraps. It was pathetic. But more than that, I really, _really_ wanted a drink of the water he’d brought with him. 

It was a cool, crisp glass, dotted with condensation. Ice clinked against the sides of the glass when Luke picked it up. His throat bobbed when he drank. 

Luke finished eating, licked his fingers clean, and watched me watch him. 

The doors burst open and a teenage boy stumbled into the room. He clutched his neck but blood was pouring from between his fingers. He wore boxers and nothing else. “Luke!” 

The boy staggered towards the sitting area where Luke had just finished his breakfast. “Luke, you have to help me. Kelli’s been siccing her girls on me.”

Luke got up and pulled the boy’s hand away. He cursed as he looked at the wound there. Even I could see that the boy’s neck and shoulders were littered with old and new wounds, half healed bite marks in his skin. Luke pulled out his handkerchief and pressed it to the boy’s neck. “I’ll make her stop,” he promised. 

The boy burst into tears. The handkerchief turned red quickly. “Why doesn’t she just use the mortals? Why does it have to be me?” 

“She’s supposed to leave the demigods alone,” Luke growled. “I’ll cull her herd. They won’t bother you again.” 

The demigod boy suddenly caught sight of me. “Is that Percy Jackson? I thought you said he was de-“ Whatever the boy had been about to say was lost when Luke snapped his neck. His body crumpled but Luke held him up by his head. 

Luke’s voice was soft, gentle even, when he said, “How many times do I have to say that my room is off limits?” Luke’s expression was stony. He sighed as he dragged the body out of his room. He kicked the door shut behind him. 

I lay in stunned silence. Suddenly I was glad that I didn’t have anything in my stomach because I would have thrown it all right up. My head was spinning and it wasn’t just from dehydration. Why would Luke kill him? Just a minute ago, Luke had actually seemed worried about him. Was it an act? 

Luke returned thirty minutes later without the body. He cleared away his dishes then sat back in his chair. He looked at me but I got the sense that his thoughts were turned inward. 

I wanted to ask Luke why he did it. I wanted to ask him why he didn’t just kill me. I had so many questions. But I couldn’t say a single word through the gag in my mouth. 

Luke sat and studied me until there was a knock at the door. He got up to answer it, only opening it enough that he could look out. 

My mind replayed the scene over and over again. Did he really kill that boy just because he barged into Luke’s room? That didn’t feel right but I couldn’t think of another answer. 

Luke left and I fell into a troubled sleep. 

The third day without food and water was the worst. I was too tired to move. My entire body hurt, inside and out. Hunger didn’t come in waves, it was a permanent empty howling spot in my belly. I wasn’t drooling anymore but that was only because my mouth was dry as a desert. 

I could _feel_ my body drying up and it was awful. My skin felt tight and thin. My mouth was dry like sand, my lips cracked and bleeding. I was losing my vision, had already lost my sense of smell. Part of me knew that I was dying. This was the slowest I’d ever come crawling to death and I hated it. I’d almost rather hold up the sky again than die of dehydration. 

I didn’t think about the demigod Luke had killed or Annabeth being imprisoned. My mind was full of steel wool. 

When Luke came, it was dark out again. He had to prop me up against the window to get me to sit up. He untied the gag and pulled it out of my mouth. It was dripping with saliva.   
The corners of my mouth felt raw. My jaw hurt. My tongue was swollen and dry. 

Luke tipped my chin up and put a glass to my lips.

My body registered water before my brain did. I drank as much as I could.

But Luke took it away too soon. “You’re going to make yourself sick if you drink too much too fast.” 

His words made me angry but I was too focused on the glass of water to even form a coherent thought. 

Luke made me drink the water slowly, in small amounts. He watched me closely.

The water made me feel better. It quenched my thirst but it also made me strong again. I finished the glass and wanted more. 

“Soon,” Luke promised me. He pulled the sheet away, untangling it from me. Then he started to untie the knots holding my legs together. Luke did it with slowness, rubbing the red skin beneath the ropes before moving on to the next knot.

I tipped my head back and hissed. He wasn’t being rough with me but it hurt to have him touch me. My skin had red indents. The texture of the rope had transferred to my skin. I grit my teeth against the pain and tried to hold in the noises of discomfort. 

Luke massaged feeling back into my legs with quiet confidence. He’s done this before. How many other prisoners did Luke do this for? When he got to my left foot, Luke frowned. “Why didn’t you tell me it was too tight?”

“Would you have listened?” I asked, genuinely curious. 

He nodded. Luke got to his feet and walked across the room. He touched a panel on the wall and it slid back to reveal a mini fridge. Luke touched another panel and an array of clean glasses sat in neat rows. He poured a shot of nectar and returned to me. “Drink this.” 

I did. 

Luke untied the last knot as the nectar slid down my throat. 

We watched as my foot, which had been turning purple-gray, returned to a normal, healthy color. The bruises from the rope didn’t heal, though. He hadn’t given me enough and nectar tended to sort out the worst wounds first. 

Luke set the glass down. He turned me around so that I was facing the window. 

Now that I could part my legs, I vowed to never close them again. I stretched and flexed and wiggled my toes. It hurt but it was a good hurt, not the kind of pain that came from being touched. 

Luke began to untie the harness around my chest and my arms. He was just as careful as before, hands massaging feeling back into my arms. “Stay still,” he warned me. “Don’t try to move yet.” 

I listened because my arms were cramped and I didn’t like it. My legs had just been held together but my arms were stuck behind my back for three days. When the harness came off, I sucked in a deep breath. I hadn’t even realized that it was restricting my breathing. 

Luke still wasn’t being rough with me but that somehow made it worse. As he worked out the knots and aches in my shoulders, I couldn’t help but think of how he’d snapped that boy’s neck with no problem. Like it had been easy. 

I shouldn’t have been surprised since thus far, Luke was able to manhandle me with the same ease that a lion could manhandle a cub. 

When he was satisfied with his work, Luke eased my hands around to my lap. His chest pressed up against my back. Even through our clothes, he was hot against my back. “Think you can stand up?” Luke asked, mouth close to my ear. 

I blamed the sudden breeze for the way my skin prickled and broke out into goosebumps. I was free but with Luke right behind me, I didn’t _feel_ free. However, he did ask a good question. Could I stand up? I twisted around and put my hand on his shoulder for leverage. Standing hurt. My elbow locked up twice before I managed to get to my feet. All of the blood rushed to my legs and my knees shook like I was going to fall over. Immediately, I leaned against the window and tucked my arms against my chest. My joints were stiff with disuse. I was still dizzy, and needed more water to sort myself out. 

Luke regarded me as he stood up, graceful as a panther. “Can you walk or do you need to be carried?” 

Heat rose to my cheeks. “Where are we going?”

Luke jerked his head towards the bathroom. 

“I’ll walk,” I said stubbornly. I pushed myself off the window and forced myself to walk. I stumbled a few times, tripping over my own feet. I only reached for Luke once, raking my nails down his bicep as I fell. 

I thought for sure he was going to kill me for that. 

But all Luke did was hiss and put me back on my feet. By the time we reached the bathroom, the scratches had healed and all that remained were bright red droplets of blood like jewels on his skin. 

I plopped down onto the alcove and stared openly at his arm. 

Luke ignored my gaze. He ran a bath in the slipper tub and I knew it was saltwater without him saying so. The tub was nearly full when he shut the water off. He came to me, took my hands in his and urged me to my feet. 

I thought about resisting but he hadn’t fed me in three days and the ropes were finally off and I wanted more to drink. There were too many reasons to go along with whatever he wanted. 

Luke led me to the slipper tub, smiling with amusement when I sidestepped the cat rug. The fact that he didn’t tell me it was nonsense to avoid it made me think that I was right about it biting. Luke made me face the tub. He took the chiton off, removing it slowly, fingertips brushing against my bare skin. The chiton fell around my ankles, a pool of light blue fabric. 

I suddenly couldn’t breathe. My nerves lit up where he touched me. The back of my neck prickled, warning me of danger. 

Luke traced the rope burn across my shoulders with a feather light touch. Again, he was a hot presence against my back and it felt so good, was such a lovely contrast against the cold of the room. Then he scooped me up and set me in the water.

I didn’t even have time to shriek, it happened so fast. My shoulders were raised so high they were practically at my ears. I held onto the edges of the bathtub with a grip so tight my knuckles were white and veins stood out on the backs of my hands. I barely registered that the water was warm. 

Luke set some bottles within my reach, and a sponge that I knew had once been a living thing. “Clean yourself up, Percy.” Then he left.

My heart thundered. It took a few minutes before my shoulders lowered and relaxed. I pried my fingers from the rim of the tub, then let myself sink below the surface. It was a cruel irony that I could breathe saltwater but not drink it. Surrounded by water but still so thirsty. The bathtub was deep. I raised my arm up and watched my bruises disappear. My skin would be unmarked when I left the water. 

Being in the water and no longer in pain, I fell asleep. 

The next thing I knew, something else had entered the water. 

I sat up so quickly that my forehead collided with Luke’s. 

“Damn it, Percy,” Luke cursed. 

Any pain I might have felt was gone immediately as the water healed that minor wound. “You scared me,” I said. 

Luke rubbed his head. The red mark I’d left was gone when he took his hand away. He frowned at me. “You didn’t soap up.”

I looked at the bottles in surprise, having forgotten they were there. “I don’t like soap in my water and I wanted to soak.” 

“Soaking times over,” Luke said. He retreated to the counter to watch me and make sure that I was doing what he told me to. 

I washed my hair and then my body. After three days without a shower, it was nice to be clean again. When I was done, I drained the tub and got out. There were towels in the same spot as before and I grabbed one for my modesty, not because I needed it to dry off. 

Luke watched me the whole time, not taking his eyes off me. When I was wrapped in the towel, he gestured for me to follow him. We went back to the closet and Luke produced another chiton. This one was black. 

“Can’t I wear something warmer?” I asked, almost whining. 

“You can’t have pockets,” Luke said. He fit the chiton over my head. No invisible hands touching me this time. 

I didn't fight him, mostly because I suspected he would leave me with just the towel if I did. “Why do you have so many chitons?”

Luke finished putting it on me. “Came with the closet.” He stepped back to look at his handiwork and nodded to himself. Then he lifted his gaze to meet my eyes. “C’mon.”

There was food in the sitting room. I smelled it before I saw it. My stomach chose that moment to remind me that I was very hungry. The plate was by my chair. I wanted to eat right away but I wasn’t sure that this wasn’t some trick. I looked at Luke for permission, even though I hated myself for it. 

Luke nodded. “It’s for you. Take it easy, though, or you’ll make yourself sick.” 

I all but threw myself into the chair and put the tray on my lap. It was a bowl of soup, still hot, with chunks of meat and veggies and noodles. There was garlic bread beside the soup. And a tall glass of water. As hungry as I was, I drank half the water before I even got started on the food. 

Luke sat down in his chair and watched me. 

I didn’t pay much attention to him. My hand trembled when I picked up the spoon but I managed to get the soup to my mouth without spilling any. It was amazing. The same kind of meat that I’d had before, delicious and succulent. I tried to pace myself but I was so hungry and it tasted so good. Everything was gone within ten minutes, even the water. 

I was so full that my stomach hurt. I set the tray aside and curled up on the arm chair, shoving a pillow between my knees so that they wouldn’t touch. 

Luke shook his head. “Should have listened to me, Percy,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about.” 

I just groaned and held my stomach. Mistakes were made. Delicious, wonderful mistakes. 

Luke laughed to himself. He got up and walked out of my line of sight. When he returned, it was with the sheet I’d stolen off his bed. He spread it out over me and went back to sit in his chair. 

I laid with my chin on the armrest, the sheet tucked tight around me, and wondered why even the good things here turned out to be bad. I used the opportunity to look around the room, trying to figure out which panels were secret storage, but my eyes kept going back to Luke. 

Luke was watching me. Well, sometimes he watched me. Other times, his gaze looked past me and out the window. He was so still but he didn’t really look at ease. 

Maybe he expected me to give him more problems. 

A long time passed before Luke said, “you’re quieter than I remember.”

I thought about that. “You gagged me,” I pointed out. “And I don’t know what to say. Don’t work for Kronos? Let me go? Let Annabeth go? Seems like a waste of breath.” 

And I was scared. Luke wasn’t like any monster I’d ever fought. For one, he healed too quickly. Even if I tried to tear out his throat with my teeth, I was sure that he’d heal within seconds. For two, Luke didn’t seem interested in killing me so much as _keeping_ me. The worst part was not knowing why. Did Kronos have some sort of plan for me? Were he and Luke such sadists that they wanted me to watch the world crumble? 

Finally, I asked, “Is Annabeth okay?” 

“She isn’t hurt,” Luke said. 

“Why isn’t she in your room with us?”

Luke was silent for a few moments. He caught my eye. “Annabeth wasn’t dying when I brought her in.” 

“I’m not dying anymore,” I pointed out. Although he’d gotten me close to death yet again. 

“And the army doesn’t want to kill her like they do you. She’s safe enough in the dungeon.” Luke said this like it answered my question. He looked annoyed now, so I didn’t ask any more questions about Annabeth. 

As I lay there curled up on the armchair, shivering even though I was beside the fire and under a sheet, I thought about Annabeth. Her beautiful golden curls, her sharp grey eyes, the fond expression on her face when she called me _Seaweed Brain._ I was used to holding her hand when I was scared but now the only hand here to hold was my own. 

I snuck a glance at Luke. Well. There was his hand too but I wasn’t all that interested in holding _his_ hand. 

Before he went to sleep, Luke tied me up again, magicking the ropes to bind my arms behind my back and my feet together. This time, he checked each rope individually, sticking his fingers between it and my skin. “Tell me if they’re too tight.” 

I glared at him.

“Percy, do you really want a limb to die and rot off just because you’re being stubborn?” 

I hesitated. “Would you really keep them on that long?” I hated that I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice. I did not want to lose a limb. Could ambrosia and saltwater even reattach a limb? I didn’t want to find out. 

Luke’s gaze was steady. “Just tell me,” he said. Then he got up from his crouch and went to the bed. He striped naked again, muscles rippling beneath tawny skin. 

“Why do you always sleep naked?” I found myself asking out loud. It wasn’t like I yelled it across the room or anything, but the whole palace was very, _very_ quiet. 

Luke twisted enough that I could see his eye roll. “Because I want to.” 

Well. I guess that was a good reason.


	4. Isolated

  
The days slipped by monotonously, with nothing to separate one from the other. The lighting in Luke’s room rarely changed and aside from the boy that Luke had killed, no one entered the room except for Luke. 

I spent most of my time tied up and alone. There were only two good things about my situation: Luke fed me at least once a day and he always made sure that the ropes weren’t too tight. 

Otherwise, I was out of my mind with boredom. 

Luke left in the morning, sometimes before I woke up, and returned in the evening. So I didn’t even have Luke to keep me entertained. 

A lot of my time was spent doing absolutely nothing, sitting still and looking out the windows, daydreaming about being anywhere but here. I made a list of Places I Would Rather Be, which included things like Auntie Em’s Garden Gnome Emporium, the Lotus Hotel and Casino, back in the Labyrinth, and English class. 

I fantasied that Apollo would come busting in with the sun chariot because surely the windows couldn’t withstand the force of a god. Gods weren’t allowed to directly intervene but maybe they would make an exception for me. I wouldn’t mind if Apollo swept me off my feet and into his chariot. 

I struggled against the ropes, tried to twist myself into endless positions so that I could gnaw on them. Despite Luke’s careful check that I wasn’t going to lose circulation, the ropes were still too tight to get out of. 

Once I got so frustrated that I screamed. And I would have kept screaming but I heard something on the other side of Luke’s door that made my blood run colder. The huffing of a large dog and the excited scratch of nails against the wood. 

After that, I dragged myself to the small toilet room and locked myself in until Luke came back. 

Luke found me in there, shivering on the cold floor, about eight hours later. He looked confused. “What are you doing in there, Percy?” 

“Didn’t you see your door?” I asked, sure that there had to be scratches on it. 

Luke cocked his head. “My door?” Luke’s image flickered and when he returned, there was understanding on his face. “It didn’t get in, though.” Luke said but he looked troubled. “Were you sitting by the door?” 

I shook my head, stunned into silence. I didn’t know Luke could move that fast. He hadn’t even stopped time first. 

Luke waved his hand and the ropes binding me fell away. “Well, come and eat before your food gets cold.”

I stood up on unsteady legs and followed him back to the main room. 

Through trial and error, I learned how loud I could be without attracting the attention of the monsters that prowled the halls. I could sing but I couldn’t belt out lyrics at the top of my lungs. I could talk but if my voice raised to a yell, it caught unwanted attention. 

The monsters put Luke’s door to the test. For the most part, the doors held and I was safe. But once a giant came and pounded on the door, demanding to know who was inside. He hit the door so hard that the wood cracked. 

When Luke got back that night, he’d been furious and stormed out immediately. He didn’t return for a long time and when he did, it was without my dinner. He stormed up to me, loomed over me, and asked in a low, angry voice, “Are you _trying_ to get eaten?” 

“No! I was just -“ And then the gag was in my mouth, muffling my words. It had come out of nowhere, tied itself tightly around my head. I glared up at Luke. 

Luke crouched in front of me, meeting my eyes. His blue eyes were cold as ice. “My room is safe for you, but don’t go tempting fate, Percy.” 

My punishment this time was two nights with the gag - he took it out on the second night so that I could drink - three nights without food, and three nights straight with the ropes on. Luke’s door had been fixed while I was sleeping. 

When my punishment was over, Luke unbound me with slow precision. My skin prickled where he touched me and when he massaged feeling back into my body, I couldn’t help but whine through my teeth. It was pain that bordered pleasure. “Why,” I asked him as he carefully pressed his fingers into my shoulders, “do you do this if you’re just going to dump me in the bath?” 

Luke’s hands stilled. “Habit, I guess. Do you want me to skip this part and just dump you in the bath?” 

Habit? How many prisoners did Luke do this for? Did he do it for Annabeth? My gut clenched and anger pooled in my veins at the very thought of his hands on her. 

“Percy?” Luke prompted, impatiently. 

“No,” I growled. 

Luke’s hands were back on my skin, fingers expertly working through the knots along my spine. “What’s got your hackles up?” 

I didn’t want to admit it, not to anyone but especially not to Luke. I opened my mouth to lie. What came out was, “I hate myself.” 

My words stunned us both into stillness. 

I bowed my head even though Luke was behind me and couldn’t see my face. Gods, where did that come from? I didn’t hate myself. There were so many other people to hate. 

Luke’s hands skimmed over my shoulder blades and stopped at my neck. For a second I thought he was going to snap my neck like he’d done to that other demigod...but Luke just pushed his thumbs into my vertebrae. “That's a mood,” he said finally. 

Did Luke hate himself? There was a lot to hate about him, so I got it. But it was still kind of sad. 

“Can we get in the bath now?” 

“Sure,” Luke said. He got up and hovered close to me, ready to catch me if my legs gave out. 

It was embarrassing. What’s more embarrassing was that my legs were traitorous and actually _would_ give out if I was tied up too long. When we got to the bathroom, I made for my customary spot at the bench. 

Luke ran both baths. When I wasn’t being punished, we always bathed together. Not, like, in the same tub, but in the same room at the same time. Luke would relax in the sunken tub and stare at the stained glass windows while I soaked beneath the surface of the saltwater in the slipper tub and pretended that I was somewhere else. 

“Is there anything to do in here?” 

Luke raised an eyebrow. 

“I’m bored,” I told him. 

Luke sighed. “Not really.” 

“That sucks.” 

“I don’t need to be doing things all the time, Percy. Sometimes it’s nice to just relax.” 

“What do you do for fun?” I pressed. There had to be something. 

Luke looked at me like I’d just spoken a foreign language. The minutes ticked by with only the crackle of the fire. Finally he threw out his hand in an exasperated gesture. “I don’t know. I don’t have fun.”

That was so depressing, I didn’t even know where to begin. Luke used to like to do things. “So when you aren’t trying to destroy the world as we know it, you just sit in your room staring out the windows and brooding?” 

Luke narrowed his eyes at me. His foot bounced. “Yup,” he said. “You’ll understand when you get older.”

I snorted. “I’m not getting older. At least, not as old as you are. I’m fated to die next year.” 

Luke cocked his head and studied me, surprise written across his features. He seemed to come to some conclusion. “Huh,” he said. 

“You know, if I don’t die before then,” I added, side-eyeing Luke.

“You think I’m going to kill you?” 

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It seems like if it was going to happen then you’d have just left me to bleed out on the floor of Geryon’s ranch house. That way it’s easier for everyone. Everyone thought I was going to die anyway.” Even me. “So you could have said something like ‘he’s too far gone to help’ and Annabeth would have forgiven you.” The bitterness in my voice surprised me. I guess I wasn’t over how much Annabeth loved and trusted Luke, even after all the times he betrayed us. 

“Annabeth is too trusting,” Luke said softly.

“That’s what I’m saying!” I said, waving my hand. 

Luke smiled, amused by my outburst. 

I tucked my hand back against my chest. “I don’t know what she sees in you.” 

To my surprise, Luke shrugged. “I don’t know either.” 

Silence fell between us once more. 

Luke was content to sit there but I wasn’t. I was never going to take walking for granted ever again. Soon, I was on my feet. I moved slowly, cautiously, so that Luke wouldn’t think I was going to try something. 

Luke watched me walk past him, swiveled in his chair so that he never lost sight of me. 

I was walking towards the door and escape briefly crossed my mind, but I dismissed it almost as soon as I had it. Luke’s room was safe. But just outside those doors, death awaited with sharp teeth. Instead, I went to the wall that held the mini fridge and tried to get the panel to open for me. I pushed the whole surface, trying to find a latch or whatever. 

Luke watched me and after five minutes with no success, he burst out laughing. His laugh startled me because I hadn’t heard him genuinely laugh in three years. “It won’t work for you, Percy. It only opens for me.” 

I frowned. “We’ll see about that.” Half an hour later, I had to conclude that he was right. I couldn’t figure out the panels. 

Once I’d given up, Luke got to his feet. “C’mon, Percy, bedtime.” He waited until I’d gone back to my spot on the rug before using magic to tie me up. Then he went to bed and that was that for the night. 

Luke started spending even more time away from his room. He left earlier and came back later every day. Until one night, he didn’t come back at all. 

I wasn’t sure what to think of that but my mind jumped to the worst conclusions. What if Luke had been killed? What was going to happen to me now? Would the monsters burst into his room and eat me? I had no reason to think that they wouldn’t. Just because I’d stopped tempting fate, didn’t mean that they wouldn’t come in to investigate once Luke was dead. 

I might not even get eaten by monsters; Luke couldn’t feed me if he wasn’t here. What if I starved? There was tap water to keep me going and I wasn’t gagged anymore but dying of starvation would be a slow, awful death. I went back and forth, debating which cause of death would be better. 

I stayed awake all night, anxious about Luke’s fate and my own. 

When he finally came back, it was midafternoon and he face-planted in his bed without untying me or feeding me. 

I was hungry and sore but my relief at having Luke back in one piece was so great that I didn’t even care about those things. Finally able to stop worrying, I fell asleep curled beneath the sheet. 

After the first time, Luke was careful to leave me food if he was going to be gone for more than a day. 

Listen, I genuinely thought that my anxiety would tone it down a little after the first few times that Luke stayed out multiple days. But it didn't. I was just as anxious about him as the first time. The only difference was now I had food to hold me for a little while. I was careful to ration it, just in case something _did_ happen to him. 

I tried to tell myself that Luke would be fine. Kronos wouldn’t let him die. Kronos needed Luke. Right? And he’d already brought Luke back from the dead once. 

Every time Luke came back, I’d sigh with relief. Relief flooded my whole body at the sight of him. A small part of me, the part of me that was still sane and rational, said that I still hated him. But it was easy to ignore it when Luke aimed his tired smile at me.

There was another problem, one that came upon me unexpectedly. It started with my fantasies, something I found myself daydreaming about more. I dreamed that I was back at Camp Half-Blood, surrounded by my friends. 

Annabeth threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. Nico pulled me in for a shy hug. Chiron patted my shoulder. Grover gave me a high-five. They were all there, all the people I cared about, and they were touching me. Someone was always touching me in my dreams. But the more they touched me, the more I craved it. 

I’d dream of sitting curled in my mother’s lap like a small child. Of Poseidon wrapping me in a tight hug. I imagined swimming in canoe lake, the naiads swimming beside me and their slick skin brushing against mine. 

When I was awake and fully conscious, I rocked back and forth. I couldn’t move my hands but I held them together. It wasn’t like touching someone else. And that was the crux of my problem; I desperately wanted to touch someone else. I wanted to feel skin against my skin and I don’t mean that in a sexual way. 

I’ve always craved affection. Having one parent that I only saw part of the year left me starved for it. I was a lonely and miserable kid growing up. Going to Camp Half-Blood actually relieved some of that loneliness. I got to interact with and actually touch other people. It felt so good. 

But now it was just me and Luke. And Luke wasn’t touching me, would only touch me after I’d been punished and he needed to rub feeling back into my skin. He wasn’t even here all the time, so I didn’t even have his company for most of the day.

I was so, so lonely. And I hated it.


	5. Escaped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A turning point for both of them

It was a surprise when I heard a knock on Luke’s door. I froze, food halfway to my mouth, and stared at Luke. 

Luke stared back at me. “Hide,” he said quietly. “And don’t make a sound.” When he saw that I was doing as he’d ordered, he got up and went to answer the door.

I hid behind the chair, my food shoved in the space beneath it. Who could it be? No one ever knocked on Luke’s door. 

“What?” Luke asked the person on the other side of the door. 

There was silence. 

Luke leaned against the doorframe. He was completely naked from the bath we’d taken earlier. It turned out that Luke only liked to be dressed if he had plans. “Well?” He drawled. 

“The girl escaped,” Kelli said. “I came right to you to tell you first, just like you wanted.” 

Did she mean Annabeth?

Luke didn’t react at all. “Hm,” Luke said as though he didn’t care at all. “I’m sure they’ll catch her.” His hands disappeared from my line of sight. “Why don’t you come in and give me a full report?”

Luke stepped back and I saw that he had the straps of Kelli’s cheer uniform clutched in both hands. He pulled her farther into the room, kicking the door shut without taking his eyes off her. 

Kelli let herself be pulled into his room with no resistance. She smiled at Luke like a cat before a bowl of cream. 

Um. What?

Luke pulled Kelli to the bed, arranged himself on the end so that Kelli’s back was to me. Kelli didn’t give her report and Luke didn’t ask for it. 

Listen, I’m not stupid. But I hadn’t even kissed a girl and I’ve never watched porn because demigods and technology didn’t mix. So it took me somewhere around seeing Luke’s dick hard and Kelli sitting on it, still in her cheer uniform, for it to click that they were having sex.

There was no foreplay - as far as I could tell - and they didn’t even kiss first. Though considering what Empousa could do, I didn’t blame Luke for not wanting to kiss her. Anyway, they skipped straight to the main event. 

Kelli moaned as though riding Luke’s dick was the best thing in the universe and anyone who was _not_ in her place should be immensely jealous. She hiked her skirt up to her ribs and I could suddenly see _everything._

From my spot on the floor, I had a perfect view of Luke’s cock disappearing into Kelli’s body with every thrust. 

Mostly I felt deeply, deeply uncomfortable. Kelli wasn’t even human, though it was just her legs that were metal and animal. The rest of her was very much human. But still. A monster was a monster.

My body wasn’t getting that memo, though. My blood rushed south so quickly that I got a head rush. I wanted to duck back beneath the chair to escape the sight before me and because all Kelli had to do was turn around and she’d see me. But I felt pinned to the spot, eyes wide, staring right at them. 

Why oh why was this turning me on? 

Don’t get me wrong, Luke is hot. He’s hot like Apollo is hot. But...but Kelli. Why would he have sex with a monster? She was only attractive until you got to her legs and since he was currently between them, Luke was touching the decidedly unattractive parts. 

Maybe this was a normal reaction to visual stimulation? Man, now I wished I knew. But we didn’t even have a computer at home and the ones at school were monitored so it’s not like I could just look it up and see if I was normal or if there was something about monsters that turned me on. 

Luke looked at me over Kelli’s shoulder. He hadn’t been touching her before, hands resting on the mattress, but suddenly he skimmed his hands up her back. He put a finger over his lips; _be quiet._

Kelli was moaning so loud that I didn’t think that would be a problem. 

I made a gesture that meant _what are you doing?!_

Luke just gave me a flat, unimpressed look. There was nothing in his eyes at all, not a single emotion. His hands fell back to the mattress. Now that I thought of it, Luke looked kind of bored. I didn’t know that sex could be boring. 

My dick throbbed in time to their thrusts. I ached to stroke it but revulsion kept me from touching myself. I didn’t want to get off to Kelli. It reminded me that I haven’t gotten off since before I got here. My balls suddenly felt heavy. I curled my hands into fists and dug my nails into my palms. I would not touch myself. 

It felt like I was crouched behind the chair for forever, as though they’d been fucking for a very long time, before someone burst into the room. 

Kelli jumped off Luke’s dick like a startled cat, turning into flame and catching my rug on fire. 

I ducked behind the chair where Kelli wouldn’t see me and slapped my hands over my mouth to keep from making any noise.

Luke growled but didn’t look overly put out. His dick was still hard and it glistened with…something wet. “For fucks sake, Kelli,” Luke snapped at the fire. Then he stalked towards the intruder. “What?” Luke snarled, sounding incredibly annoyed at being interrupted. 

I don’t know why, considering he didn’t look like he’d been having a good time before. 

The monster’s gaze flickered between the fire demon burning the rug in front of the windows and Luke, standing naked with his very erect penis out where anyone could see it. “Uh, the uh, the girl escaped the palace,” the monster said. He looked like he would rather be anywhere but in this room. 

I could relate. 

“Find her,” Luke growled. “And stay out of my room.” He slammed the door shut in the monster’s face. There was a muffled yelp. Luke ignored it and turned to Kelli, his gaze every bit as cold as she was hot. “Get the fuck out of my room.” 

Kelli vanished in a puff of smoke, leaving behind the smell of burning fabric. My rug was a black smear of ash on the ground. 

Once it was just the two of us, Luke stalked over to me. He was still very naked and hard and he looked pissed off. 

For a scary second, I thought he was going to use me to finish what Kelli started. 

“Did she see you?” 

I crouched on the floor, every muscle prepared for a fight even though I was still rock hard. I looked up at him and shook my head. My eyes kept falling back to his dick. Like I said before, my experiences with seeing naked adults began and ended with Luke, but I’d never seen him hard before. I was curious and horny and embarrassed for both of those things and a little bit scared. 

Luke’s shoulders fell and he let out a relieved sigh. He looked down at himself and made a face. “I need a shower,” he muttered even though we just took a bath. Luke turned and his image shimmered. One second he was there, the next I heard the water running in the bathroom. 

My heart beat so fast I thought it was going to bust out of my chest. As soon as Luke was gone, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. I dropped onto my elbows and pressed my face into my hands. Oh my gods. _Oh my gods._ I shook like I was coming down off an adrenaline rush and I guess I was. That was a lot of things happening in the span of maybe twenty minutes. 

By the time Luke returned, I felt in control of myself enough to finish eating. I wasn’t hungry anymore but I never knew when Luke would withhold food so it was better to eat now than regret it later. 

Luke was still naked when he walked over to survey the damage done to my rug, but at least he wasn’t hard anymore. He looked down at it with a frown and then waved his hand. Time flashed backwards; but only for the rug. In a few seconds, the rug and the sheet were back in pristine condition as though Kelli had never been there. 

My jaw dropped. I couldn’t handle all this at once. This was what I got when I wanted entertainment. 

“There. Your bed is back to normal,” Luke said. He went to his own, actual bed, crawled up onto it and laid down. 

“Beds have pillows,” I blurted out. 

A pillow went sailing across the room and smacked into the window. It fell to the floor by my rug. I walked over and picked it up. “Did you have sex on this?” I found myself asking.

“Did you see me have sex on it?” Luke countered, amusement in his voice. 

“No,” I said. Before this, Luke hadn’t brought anyone to his room. Did he just not have sex very often or was he doing it somewhere else? “Were they talking about Annabeth?”

Luke sighed. “Yes, Percy.”

She left without me. I’d never left her before, never let her stay in trouble. But she left me here with Luke. I tried not to feel hurt about that but it was hard not to. “You could have helped her escape.”

“What do you think I was doing?”

I didn’t want to say the word sex in front of him again. It was embarrassing. I couldn’t get the image of his hard dick out of my mind. The whole thing was embarrassing. 

“Percy,” Luke said, tone patient like when he taught sword fighting. For the first time, I noticed that Luke had a teacher voice. “Who knew that Annabeth escaped her room?”

“Um, Kelli.” 

“Anyone else?”

“You?”

Luke clapped sarcastically. “So why did I let Kelli into my room?”

I bit my tongue so that I wouldn’t blurt out the obvious. So that he could have sex with her? So that he could torture me in a new way? I stared at his still form on the bed and thought that those were too obvious. Luke was clever, whether I wanted to admit it or not. “You were distracting her so that Annabeth could escape.”

Luke hummed agreement. “Good to see your brain still works.”

My chin quivered and I was glad that Luke was faced away from me. Annabeth left me here, Luke called me stupid, and I had to watch a demigod have sex with a monster. Plus there was my aching loneliness and the unwanted physical ache between my legs. It was all a little too much in too short a time. “Why didn’t you let me go?” I asked, my voice wavering. 

“Because I don’t love you,” Luke said. 

Luke’s words were a knife through my heart. I felt skewered, ripped open. I don’t know why it hurt so much but the pain was sharp and strong enough that I looked down at my chest, expecting to see a wound. There was nothing but the chiton and my smooth skin. “That’s a bad reason, Luke.” My voice sounded small and childish. It was hard to talk around the lump in my throat. “You’re a bad person.”

“Percy,” Luke said in the tone that meant he would bring out the gag if I didn’t shut up. 

I clutched the pillow to my chest and cried into it. The pillow smelled like Luke. 

Luke stopped tying me up at night. We didn’t talk about it. 

Nothing interesting happened after the Kelli/Annabeth incident. That lulled me into a false sense of security, as though nothing else could possibly happen now that we’d had such excitement. I was wrong, of course. 

It was night. I laid on the floor in my usual spot, curled around a pillow that was beginning to smell more like me than like Luke. My eyes were closed but I wasn’t asleep; just bored. 

Luke was in his bed when I heard a noise from him. It was a small noise, just a little moan. At first I thought it was part of a nightmare. He got those sometimes. Then he let out another soft moan. 

My body responded to the noise with a burst of pleasure in my gut that left me wanting...something. Aside from the sex I’d witnessed a few days ago, I’ve never heard anyone moan from sexual pleasure before. But my body sure knew what that sound was and what it meant and made sure that I knew it too. My heart pounded out a fast tempo and my temperature shot up, heat coursing through my veins like a disease. 

Luke was masturbating. 

In the same room as me. 

To be fair, he probably thought that I was asleep. He’s probably done this before while he thought I was asleep. This room was his, after all. And no one bothered him here (except for me).

I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. What should I do? Should I tell him that I was awake? No. What if he got mad at me? Was this a violation of his privacy or of mine? In the end, I laid still and listened to Luke get himself off. I listened to the sound of his dick sliding through his hand, to his quiet moans, to the way his breath caught and turned ragged.  


By the time Luke came, I was hard as steel. Now I knew what he sounded like when he came. My head swam with the new information. I wanted to touch myself but I also really didn’t want to. This was Luke! I couldn’t get off to Luke getting off!

When he was done, Luke actually went to sleep. 

It took me a long time, but I finally fell into an uneasy sleep too. 

When I woke up, there was dried cum inside my chiton and my balls finally felt light. I washed up and pulled on a new chiton before Luke could see. 

Luke put the ropes back on me with magic. “I’ll be back in a few days.” 

“Where are you going?” I asked as I tested the limits of the ropes. They were as tight as ever. 

“To look for Annabeth,” Luke said with a sigh. He ran his hand through his hair. There were dark circles beneath his eyes. 

“What will you do when you find her?” 

Luke shook his head and then he was gone. 

There were more patrols in the hallway outside, more heavy footsteps walking past the door. Security had been upped because of Annabeth’s escape. 

I kept quiet; didn’t want to draw their attention. We were lucky that Kelli hadn’t noticed me before. Now that Annabeth was gone, I knew that I was alone in this prison. Nico leaving without me was annoying but Annabeth felt like a betrayal. Maybe she didn’t think I was worth saving. 

I prayed to every God and Goddess I could think of. _Please, please, someone get me out of here._

But no one answered.

Maybe I wasn’t worth saving. 

Luke left me enough food for three days but I rationed it. Good thing too, because it took another two days before he returned. This was the longest he’d been gone.  


He crossed the room to me and knelt beside me, started untying the ropes without a word. 

“Did you find her?” I asked, twisting my head around to see Luke’s face. 

“No.” His voice was hoarse. The shadows around his eyes were darker. Luke stared unblinking as he rubbed feeling back into my arms. 

“I hope she’s safe.”

Luke pushed me forward with a hand between my shoulder blades. His hand skimmed down to my waist and he worked his thumbs into the knots by my spine, slowly moving up. 

“Can’t you untie my legs first?” I protested. The position wasn’t comfortable. 

“It’s a process, Percy,” Luke muttered. He sounded genuinely exhausted. His hands slowly worked up to my shoulder blades. 

The pad of his thumb ran over a spot that I’d rubbed sore through basic movements. It was a problem every time Luke tied me but usually not this bad. 

My breath caught and I bit my lip to keep from making noise. 

Luke sighed, breath ghosting across my shoulders. “Do you want to just take a bath?” He asked. 

I couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched me. It felt so good that I could cry tears of relief. I shook my head. 

Luke rubbed his thumb over the spot again. 

I flinched. 

“Are you sure?” Luke pressed. “It would fix your shoulder.” He moved past the spot, thumbs working higher towards my neck. 

“I’m…” My voice cracked. I tried again. “I’m sure.” I closed my eyes and focused on the feeling of Luke’s hands on my back. Human-to-human contact was another thing I would never take for granted again. My teeth sank deeper into my lip. A tear slid down my cheek. 

When he was done with my back, Luke moved around to my front. He started untying my legs and stopped. “Are you alright? Do you want some nectar?” 

“‘m fine,” I mumbled through my teeth. I kept my eyes closed, couldn’t bear to look Luke in the eyes. 

Luke brushed the tear from my chin then returned to untying my legs. 

As soon as my legs were free, I let them fall open. I sighed with relief. It felt so good to finally be able to spread my legs. I never wanted my knees to touch ever again. 

Luke gave an amused snort, which was the closest he’d come to a laugh in a long time. He pulled my foot into his lap and started massaging it. 

I leaned back on my hands, face tipped towards the ceiling. My arms were weak from disuse but they held me for the moment. I couldn’t stop the noises that came from my throat, little hisses and moans. I couldn’t decide if Luke’s hands on my bruised skin actually hurt or if it felt so good that it bordered on pain. 

Luke worked his way massaging up to my knees. Normally I was ticklish behind my knees so the fact that he could touch me without making me reflexively kick him in the face was something that I took to mean he had magic hands. When he was done, he sat back on his haunches. 

I hauled myself to my feet, used his shoulder as a hand hold. 

Luke rose after me, stayed close so that he could catch me when I inevitably fell. Which happened about three steps away from the window. “You need exercise,” Luke noted.

“You could leave the ropes off,” I suggested as I found my balance again. 

Luke helped me to my usual spot on the bench, then began to fill the tubs. “And let you get yourself eaten?”

I watched the water fill into the sunken tub at my feet. Quietly, I said “I wouldn’t leave.” 

“Getting eaten makes it difficult to leave,” Luke said. He ran his hand under one of the faucets to check the temperature.

“I meant that I wouldn’t leave your room,” I said, a little louder, managing to look only at Luke’s feet. 

From my peripherals, I could see Luke staring at me, appraising me. He approached and helped me back onto my feet. Once we were before the slipper tub, Luke took my chiton off, unbelted it and slid it off my shoulders. His fingertips trailed from my shoulders to my ribs and came to rest at my hips. 

The chiton fell to the floor in a blue pool of fabric around my feet. I hardly dared to breathe. Every time he did this, it made my breath catch. Inexplicably, I thought of Luke’s hand on his dick, stroking himself, and I wondered what it would be like if he touched me like that. I jerked away from him and ungracefully climbed into the tub, sloshing water over the edge. I sunk beneath the surface of the water and watched Luke watch me. 

Why was he looking at me? 

Why didn’t he just go take his stupid bath? 

Luke stared down at me for a few heartbeats longer before moving out of my line of sight. 

I let out of a sigh of relief and wondered why I immediately wanted Luke to come back.


	6. Gifted

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things get heated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today is Sunday but I don't get to sleep for 20 hours so I'm posting it early.

Every day I expected to be rescued. I daydreamed about Annabeth leading a group of demigods to come and get me out. Sometimes, in my daydreams, they would come bursting in with a blaze of glorious Greek fire and celestial bronze. Sometimes it would be a quiet mission, one of stealth where we would have to tiptoe through the cold palace and evade monsters. I didn’t care how they rescued me; I just wanted it to happen. 

But the days slipped by and rescue didn’t come. 

So my daydreams shifted and I looked for signs. For a message. They had to at least try to contact me. I knew that they would at least do that. I searched for a sign in the shape of the clouds, in the groan of the water, in the diamonds that dotted the ceiling. I analyzed my dreams for some sign. I watched the sunrise and prayed. I sat in the moonlight, staring until all I could see was the silver disk in the sky and prayed. 

_Please save me. Please help me. Please send a sign. Please don’t forget about me._

There was nothing. No rescue and no message. I felt the weight of the sky again, but this time it was a weight on my heart. 

Luke took notice. He tried to pretend like he didn’t, but I could see that he knew something was wrong with me. He brought me gifts.

The biggest gift that Luke gave me was one he didn’t even realize was a gift; he didn’t tie me up at night. It was only an inch of freedom but you know what they say; give an inch, take a mile.

In the early hours of the morning, when I was absolutely sure that Luke was asleep, I went into the bathroom and quietly turned on the tap to fill the bath. I had to focus to make the water fall silently. Once the bath was full, I’d play with the water, making spheres hover in the air and bending it to my will. 

I taught myself how to harden the water so that I could hold it and made a water replica of Riptide. 

When I got better at manipulating the water, I made figures out of it; opponents to fight. I had to move carefully, always light on my feet, so that I didn’t wake Luke. Every night, I practiced. I would be ready. Ready for escape, ready for rescue. They would come for me and I would be ready. 

In the morning, Luke would find me bathing in the slipper tub, water calm as a pond, no sign of what I’d been doing in the night. 

But that barely counted as a gift because it wasn’t intentional. 

“Oh,” Luke said like he’d just remembered something. He reached into his pocket and tossed something to me.

I caught it on reflex and looked. It was an iPod with earbuds wrapped around it. I looked at him and blinked. 

Luke’s shoulders were tense. “You said you were bored.” He sounded unsure. How could the general of the Titan army wear his heart on his sleeve like that? 

“I can have this? It’s for me?” I verified, because part of me suspected that it was a trick. 

Luke nodded.

I unwrapped the earbuds and scrolled through the music. There was some stuff I’d never listen to in a hundred years but there was also some really good stuff on here. I put the earbuds in and hit play. The first chords of a song hit my ears and I couldn’t help but smile. It’s been so long since I’ve heard anything except screams and the distant rumbling of thunder. And I was hoping that there would be a message here. That some God had interfered and put the idea of the iPod in Luke’s head. 

Luke’s shoulders relaxed once he saw my smile. Neither of us knew how short lived my smile would be. It was a brief respite from my recent lackluster behavior. 

But as I listened to the songs over and over, tried to find a hidden meaning in them, I was forced to come to the conclusion that it was just music. No one was reaching out to me. 

Luke also brought me books. It wasn’t the best gift for me. I mean, I struggle with reading a lot. It’s part of the dyslexia and ADHD. The books were in Ancient Greek, Latin, or English. I could barely read the English or the Latin and I was pretty sure that he was stealing them from the army because they weren’t books that I would have picked out for myself or Luke. When I was particularly bored, I struggled through reading a few paragraphs at a time. 

Not to sound like a little kid, but the best books were the ones with illustrations. I really liked looking at full page illustrations of...anything, really. Like I’d said before, there was no art here in the palace and what little there was to see, I was sick of looking at. 

The most bizarre thing that Luke ever brought me - and the closest thing to a weapon - were three weighted bronze balls the size of baseballs. They must have weighed ten pounds each, though. “What am I supposed to do with these?” I asked him. 

Luke had shrugged. I got the feeling they were less stolen for me and more because Luke was a kleptomaniac like all the Hermes kids were. 

I hefted one in my hand and then turned and threw it at the window with all my strength. The bronze ball bounced off it and Luke and I both ducked to avoid getting hit. It landed with a thunk on the marble floor beside Luke. I trotted over to see if it broke the floor. There was a very, very small crack in the marble that I could feel but not see. 

I expected Luke to be angry but all he said was “Try to avoid chipping my floors.” 

I nodded agreement. I played with the bronze balls when I wanted something to do. Mostly, I’d throw them into the air and catch them. Sometimes I tried to knock diamonds out of the ceiling but I could never throw that high. I broke my fingers a couple of times. Like I said, they weighed ten pounds each. I always healed them with saltwater before Luke noticed. 

It did occur to me that I could probably smash in Luke’s skull with one of these. Or all of them, pelted at his head one after another. I think I read somewhere about a woman killing her boyfriend by dropping a bowling ball on his head while he slept. Somehow, I thought Luke was too thick-headed for that to work. 

Sometimes I nudged the bronze balls along the floor and puttered after them like a disinterested cat. I would have kicked them, but I didn’t want to break my toes. Breaking my toes meant struggling to walk and I was never, never going to do anything that would prevent me from walking. 

Luke never tried to hide how he looked at me. There were no frivolous glances or peeks from the corner of his eye. No. Luke was always direct in his staring. Even to the point where he positioned himself so that I was always in his line of sight. 

Luke liked watching me play with the balls. He liked watching me move around the room listening to the iPod and doing a mockery of dance. He liked watching me read a book, twirling my lengthening hair between my fingers while I struggled to make sense of the words. Sometimes he talked to me. Never about the ongoing war. Usually about his time at Camp or homeless or he would ask questions about my life before camp. 

And sometimes he would ask questions that had nothing to do with our lives. “If you could be a God,” Luke asked during breakfast one day. Breakfast was oatmeal with sliced bananas and apples, and thick, still-sizzling sausages. “What would you be the God of?”

“Can I be something that someone else already is?” I asked.

I don’t know where or how Luke’s army got such good food. Well, I knew where the meat came from, though I didn’t like to think about how I was eating Apollo’s sacred red cows. But the rest of it? There was a crazy variety of high quality foods that he brought me every single day, three times a day. It was always fresh, it was always the perfect temperature, it always tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten before. Even the strawberries tasted better than what we grew at Camp, and a God was growing those. 

Eating was a religious experience. 

Luke nodded. There was something in his eyes that said he wanted an honest, thoughtful answer out of me. 

“Let me think about it,” I said. 

We took two baths a day. Which meant getting naked at least twice a day. I stood by the slipper tub, watching Luke in my peripherals. 

I liked the way his muscles moved when he stretched. I liked watching him go taut and then relax into looseness with a contented sigh. Of course while we were naked, I spent a fair amount of time staring at his butt and his dick. The fact was, I could look at his face any time. I’d seen his face and his arms and his legs often enough. Even his chest and back weren’t foreign things to me. 

I hate to admit that I compared myself to him. I couldn’t help it. But mostly I just looked.

If Luke ever caught me looking, he gave no indication of it. 

“Who would you be?” I asked, continuing our conversation from earlier. “If you could be a God?” 

Luke stepped down into the sunken tub and eased himself into the water. He gave a content sigh and tipped his head back. I got a good view of the white streak in his hair. “I’ll tell you after you tell me.” 

Lately, lunch was usually fish. Salmon to be exact. It was usually grilled and sliced, laid out on a salad. This was the only meat we ate that wasn’t one of the sacred cows. It was drizzled with a zesty lemon sauce and surrounded with avocados and baby tomatoes and sunflower seeds. 

Normally I wasn’t a fan of salad but I had gone hungry before and since I never knew when I might anger Luke, I ate whatever he gave me without complaining. 

Besides, I figured it was healthy for me. I was beginning to go soft around the edges again and I didn’t like it. If I ever got out of here, I wanted to be in shape. 

“Can I be the God of more than one thing?” I asked. 

Luke gave a thoughtful hum. “Only if they go together.”

“Like music and the sun?” I asked, a teasing lilt in my voice. 

Luke’s lips twitched in amusement. “Yes.” 

Dinner came and it was spicy noodles that burned my tongue. The meat was seasoned with the same spice. I didn’t mind the burn, though. Luke’s room was so cold, even after being here for over a month, that I welcomed any source of heat. 

Luke sat across from me, taking sips of his red wine between bites. He wouldn’t let me have coffee but he didn’t seem to care if I drank alcohol. 

I tried not to drink the wine, at first. It smelled like grapes gone bad and had an underlying woody smell to it. But Luke hadn’t offered any other beverages and my mouth was burning. I drank the wine in sips because it didn’t taste good. It went like this: a bite of spicy noodles, a sip of wine to cool the burn, another bite of noodles to get rid of the wine taste, etc… 

For the first time all day, I gave Luke’s question some serious thought. If I could be a God, what would I be the God of? I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about being a God before this. But I’d never thought about what I would rule over. Some part of me just assumed I would be the God of...some sort of body of water. Lakes or maybe rivers? Something that tied in with my dad and my current powers. 

What would I be the God of? 

Revenge? I did help my mother to kill Gabe and that had felt good. 

There wasn’t a patron God of sword fighting was there? I liked fighting with Riptide best of all. Maybe that would be my calling. 

What did I like? What did I want? 

I liked being free. I liked having the choice to do and say what I wanted to. I could be...the God of free will? 

Just thinking that around Luke made my skin crawl with anxiety. No. I don’t think that’s a thing, especially not for the Greeks. We don’t get free will. 

By the time our plates were empty and cleared away, I still hadn’t decided on what I would be the God of. 

Luke refilled our wine glasses. He didn’t explicitly say anything but I was pretty sure that he expected me to drink this glass too. He sat down opposite me and watched me.

I was used to that by now, used to having his eyes on me, and it was easy to ignore. I curled up on the armchair with my glass of wine and stared at the fireplace. It was such a small thing, but I wanted to see orange flames again. Safe, familiar, home. Not cold and green and harsh like these flames. 

Home. 

The thing I wanted so badly that a place in my chest was hollow with the want of it. A place to call my own, a place full of family and love and warmth. 

“I would be the God of the hearth,” I said into the crackling silence. Then I took a big sip of wine, so that I could delay looking at Luke. It settled uneasily in my stomach. 

“Really?” Luke asked, surprise clear in his voice. 

My face warmed with a blush. “What? Were you expecting something glamorous and powerful?” 

“Yeah. Kind of.” 

“Well I didn’t ask for this life or for these powers. It’s nothing I would have chosen for myself if anyone had given me a choice other than fight or die.” My voice was hard and bitter. I drank the rest of my wine in a few gulps and dropped the glass onto the rug. It didn’t break, which was both relieving and irritating. I scowled at the pristine glass. 

Luke got up and closed the distance between us in a few steps. He took my hands. “Let’s take a bath,” he said and lightly tugged on me. 

I let him pull me up. The blood rushed to my face. “You would be the God of baths,” I told him. “Cause you always want to be in the bath.”

Luke slipped an arm around my waist and walked with me to the bathroom. “I like taking baths,” Luke said. “I like being clean.”

I nodded. “I noticed. Is...is it cause you were homeless for like...five years?” It should have bothered me that he was touching me, a part of me thought. I should have hated to have his blood stained hands anywhere near me. But that voice was far quieter than the one that screamed _‘Yes! Finally! Human contact!’_

Luke kept me close to him while he ran the water in the slipper tub. “Yes,” he said and positioned me in front of him. 

I leaned against Luke’s chest. My body was warm and light yet I felt oddly detached from it. I tipped my head back to see his face but found myself focusing on the diamonds in the ceiling instead. They seemed to spin, but not like they had the first time I woke up in the slipper tub. This was a dance and it was beautiful. “You never told me yours.”

Luke hummed, low in his throat and I could feel the vibrations of it. His hands were still on me, sliding up my arms towards the neckline of my chiton. “I don’t think you’ll like it,” Luke said, voice gravelly. 

Goosebumps broke out across my skin but it had nothing to do with the cold. “Why not?” I asked, turning my head so that my cheek rested against his shoulder. “Is it something stupid like the God of war?” 

Luke gave an amused snort. His fingers skimmed my shoulders as he slowly eased the chiton off of me. We had been here many times before and Luke didn’t usually take his time undressing me. Now he did, touch lingering before moving to new places. Namely, my chest. “We want the same thing, Percy.” Luke’s face was turned towards mine, mouth practically touching my ear. 

I arched my back to help him slide the chiton off of me. “What do you want?” 

Luke’s fingers trailed over my chest, catching my nipples on the way down to my ribs. 

My breath caught and my dick took an interest in what was happening. I felt too good, too relaxed to care that I was getting hard. Although, Luke might notice when he tried to get the chiton past my hips. The thought made my dick twitch. 

Luke made that humming noise again though now that I heard it a second time, it sounded more like a growl. If you could growl approvingly, anyway. “Hearth,” Luke said and his fingers were at my waist. 

I was practically panting even though I hadn’t done anything. 

“Home,” Luke said. His fingers skimmed over my hips with the chiton, didn’t even pause to get caught on my half-hard dick. He was so close to touching me in a place that no one had ever touched me before. 

I was panting now and my heart raced so fast I thought it would burst. 

“Family,” Luke said and his lips were touching my neck just below my ear. His hands were on my thighs, touched me feather-light and caused warmth to bloom under my skin. His chest was pressed to my back, skin hot against mine and a pleasant contrast to the cold room. “Get in the bath, Percy,” Luke murmured. 

With Luke’s hand to support me, I got in the bath. By this time, it was second nature to sink below the surface and look up at the shimmering diamonds that dotted the ceiling. Being in the water came with an unexpected, unwelcome side effect in that I was immediately stone cold sober. It felt like ice water filling my veins, all warmth and pleasant feelings gone in an instant. 

I was going to let him touch me. I _wanted_ him to touch me. 

No. 

NO. 

Luke was evil and he killed demigods and he fucked monsters. I didn’t want his hands on me. I didn’t want him anywhere near me at all. Being trapped here with him was a nightmare. 

I curled up on my side, closed my eyes, and cried underwater. 

Eating wasn’t the only religious experience. So to speak. 

Now that I knew Luke masturbated, I couldn’t unknow it and it seemed like he did it all the time. Okay, so not all the time. Luke didn’t have a masturbation schedule. It was every other night, sometimes more or sometimes less. Because I was paying attention - and what else was there to pay attention to? - I knew that Luke preferred to do it when he was relaxed. Luke wasn’t always relaxed. Things with the war kept him tense and sometimes I did too, when I wasn’t good. Luke didn’t masturbate when he was really tense. He just fell into his bed and slept away the hours.

When Luke did masturbate, I was awake for it. Whether I wanted to be or not, because it was like my body had a sixth sense for when Luke had his hand wrapped around his dick. At first I tried to give him some privacy, because I always liked privacy when I jacked off. 

Curiosity always, inevitably, got the better of me. I watched him. Usually I could only see the bend of his raised leg, the movement of his hand. But that was enough because I could fill in the details; could picture what his dick looked like, knew what it smelled like. Sometimes I thought I could taste his skin on my tongue. Yeah, I know. It was pretty bad and every time I would be wracked with guilt. 

There was a reason Luke waited until he thought I was asleep. I was being a peeping Tom, a pervert. The worst part wasn’t even the guilt, though that twisted up my gut into knots. 

It was how I responded to Luke’s sessions. Every single time, without fail, I got hard. It was awful. My dick chubbed up and my whole body throbbed with desire. Thoughts I’d never had about a boy before invaded my mind and it was like there was a voice whispering about how it would feel to have Luke touch me there. I only touched myself long enough to tuck my dick between my thighs. The pressure of my thighs was a sweet agony; not enough, just a tease. I was determined not to get off. 

I didn’t know why I responded like this; with a full-body, all-encompassing desire that came on so fast and lingered so long that it kind of scared me. Objectively, I knew that Luke was attractive. He had the physique of a God. Even the scar on his face was appealing, now that I had my own scars and understood. But I didn’t like boys like that. Right? 

I was beginning to think that maybe girls weren’t my only interest. Then something happened that made me stop doubting. 

After our baths were over, Luke produced a can of coke and presented it to me. 

I was scared to touch him. I didn’t want to take the coke. It felt like a trick. I took it anyway and I drank the entire thing with Luke watching me. His blue eyes were as sharp as ice. They reminded me of glaciers. 

Luke left me untied while he slept and I made the most of it by pacing. I wouldn’t take something as simple as walking for granted ever again and I had nervous energy to burn. I listened to my music and paced in front of the windows. How long would it be until my feet wore tracks in the rug? How long would I be here? 

It was a few hours before I wore myself out enough to lay down on the rug. I pulled the earbuds out and thought about strangling Luke with them. I’d heard somewhere that it took several minutes to kill someone via strangulation; which would be more than enough time for Luke to stop me and take his anger out on me. I laid on my side, facing the room, trying to ignore that the sheet I used smelled like Luke and so did the pillow beneath my head. Come to think of it, I probably smelled like Luke. 

An hour after I laid down, sleep still evaded me. 

But Luke woke up. He sat up and glanced towards me, then got out of bed and went to the wall. The panel he opened was one I hadn’t seen before. He took something out of it, then returned to the bed. The lighting wasn’t good enough for me to see what he had. 

Luke lay on his back with his legs spread. I heard the distinct pop of a bottle being opened. That was new. He poured the contents of the bottle onto something in his other hand. Then he put the hand with the object between his thighs. He shifted, whined a little, and pulled one leg to his chest. 

With his leg pulled up, I could kind of see what he was doing. 

Here’s what Luke wasn’t doing: he wasn’t slicking up his dick or playing with his balls. His hand was too low for either of those things. I still couldn’t see what he held but Luke’s breath caught when his hand shifted. “Ah!” Luke said softly, followed by a moan I had never heard before. 

It’s not like I’m an expert on Luke’s moans but the tone and pitch of this one was different. If his other moans got me kinda interested, this one sucker punched me in the dick with how ‘interested’ I was. Listening to this moan, I realized that he’d been faking it with Kelli; and badly. This was real, genuine pleasure. Whatever he was doing to himself felt so good that he couldn’t hold it in.

My heart beat so fast. As turned on as I was, I was still really confused. What was he doing? What did he have? For that matter, where exactly was he touching himself? 

Luke’s hand moved between his parted legs. He whimpered. His hips thrust up off the bed. With his other hand, he grabbed his dick, not stroking it, just holding it. The hand between his legs moved. Whatever he was doing to himself seemed to rile him up a lot more than usual. 

The room was still cold but I barely felt it in the wake of the heat that coursed through me. Beneath the sheet, my hands hiked up the chiton. Where was he touching? I curled one hand around my dick, loosely because I wasn’t going to jack off no matter how hard and aching I was. I just wanted to know. My other hand, I slid between the heat of my thighs. I skimmed my finger past my balls and then felt the puckered skin of my - I jerked my hand away. _Oh my gods._

Luke rolled onto his side, facing away from me, and I got a good view of what he was doing. He had something that he was working in and out of his body with sharp snaps of his wrist. He liked that? Of course he did. Luke’s moans were what I could only think of to describe as sluttish. Every one of them hit me with a new wave of arousal so strong it almost hurt. 

My dick twitched and a huge amount of precum pooled at the head. I tightened my grip on my dick without thinking. I was hot, skin burning for the first time since coming here, and so dizzy. It was like overdosing on nectar all over again except I was achingly turned on. 

When he came, Luke’s moan was loud enough that it startled me. He shuddered like he’d been electrocuted. Luke lay boneless on the bed, curled up and letting out a content sigh. He only stayed there for a moment. Then he sat up - a gasp and another moan - and slid off the edge of the bed. It was still inside of him. Luke staggered to the bathroom like his legs were made of jelly. That must have been some orgasm. 

My hand glided over my dick, wet with precum and slow so that Luke wouldn’t hear. He thought I was asleep. He didn’t know I was watching him. 

I thought about Luke’s chest pressed against my back, the way his hands skimmed over my skin, how I had begun to crave that contact. For the first time it occurred to me that Luke was probably lonely too, probably starved for the touch of another. A wild thought: _I_ could touch him. _I_ could be the one pressed against his back, it could _my_ fingers skimming across his skin. _It could be me,_ I thought, _in place of whatever Luke was using to fuck himself._

__A bolt of pleasure shot through me. I shoved the meat of my hand into my mouth to muffle the sounds that wanted to escape my lips. My orgasm hit so hard that I barely noticed the pain of my teeth in my skin. I panted through my open mouth, trying to be quiet._ _

__Luke would be back any minute._ _

__I adjusted the chiton so that the wet spot didn’t touch my skin. My eyelids were drooping, too heavy to keep open. I let sleep take me while I was still in post orgasm bliss._ _


	7. Survived

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy loses his will to live

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I'm changing the update day to Sunday instead of Monday because I was a fool to believe I'd ever want to update on a Monday. 
> 
> TW for suicide attempt

I don’t know how long I was asleep. Time was meaningless even when I had access to a clock. Now that I didn’t have a clock or a calendar, time was doubly meaningless. I measured the days by the lighting outside and sometimes even that was unreliable because of all the gods-damned cloud cover. 

When I woke, there was no blissful moment of forgetting or the pleasant lightness that came after an orgasm. I was immediately slammed with guilt. It twisted up inside of me and in seconds, I was shimmying out of my chiton. I left it on the floor and hurried to the bathroom naked. I shivered hard enough that my teeth clacked, hand gripping my biceps and shoulders hunched. 

“Percy?” Luke’s voice from the bed.

I ignored him, climbed into the shower stall. It was my first time being in one of them. I didn’t even turn the water on with the knob, just willed it through the pipes until it fell cold onto me. The shivering became more violent. My stomach heaved but nothing came up. 

I’d gotten off to Luke, intentionally. I’d watched him fuck himself with...with something. I’d thought about being the one who was inside of him. 

My chest rose and fell rapidly. I was disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. How was it that I couldn’t even stand Annabeth creeping out my window while I slept but I’d somehow justified watching Luke doing something so...so _intimate and personal?_ It’s not like Luke _wanted_ me to watch. Even with Kelli - who was a sex demon and Luke obviously hadn’t wanted to have sex with her - he was just distracting her so that Annabeth could escape. And I had watched him then too. Without his consent. Like a disgusting little creep. A pervert. Luke might have been evil and I was more than willing to fight him or trick him, but this wasn’t fighting and this wasn’t for the good of the Camp. 

I shivered in the shower, cold water falling heavily over me. My powers were straining to pull the water in the pipes towards me. The water wasn’t draining, made a puddle around my feet and then up to my ankles. If I let go of my hold on it, the water would spill out of the shower. I was so cold. My teeth clacked loudly. I might have been crying but there was so much water being poured onto my head that I couldn’t tell. 

The shower door opened. Not a single drop of water escaped. A hand reached in and pulled me out. The water from the shower came out with me, spilling all over the floor in a rush. 

I slipped on the smooth floor and yelped as I hit my knees hard on the marble. 

Luke fell too, slipping backwards onto his ass. He winced but didn’t look overly upset. Just confused, maybe even worried. 

I didn’t deserve it. I huddled on the floor, doubled over and shivering, unable to look Luke in the eye. If I had thought that it was cold before my shower, it was absolutely freezing now. Every part of me was so cold that it hurt. I whined, low and unhappy, and completely on accident. 

Luke didn’t slip a second time as his image flickered. One second he was sitting on his ass, the next he was standing over me with a towel in his hands. He draped the heated towel over me and then hauled me to my feet. We walked out of the puddle, leaving behind wet footprints, the soles of our feet making smacking sounds. Luke got another towel and tied it around my waist. 

My shivering didn’t stop. Distantly I wondered if I was going to get sick and die. This didn’t seem like the kind of place that would allow someone to get better from sickness. But I had never been sick in my life; I didn’t think I’d start now. 

Luke led me to the closet and its plush carpeting. He sat me down on the fainting couch and moved among his clothes, searching for something. There was a _rip_ as Luke tore fabric. 

I curled up with the two towels, eyes squeezed shut and muscles aching with tension. I deserved this. What I didn’t deserve was Luke still taking care of me. 

Luke returned to me with a plush, golden robe. He pulled the towels away and wrapped me up in the robe, belting it. There weren’t pockets on the robe, those had been what Luke ripped off. Then, Luke knelt in front of me. He looked me in the eye. His hands were on my thighs, and even through the robe I could feel the heat of them. “What happened, Percy?”

I shook my head. There was no way that I was going to tell him. My shivering hadn’t stopped and now I broke out into fresh goosebumps. 

Luke’s thumbs dipped down to my inner thighs as he rubbed them back and forth. “Why did you…” Luke paused, thinking about how to word my momentary bought of insanity. “Why the shower, Percy? And that water is freezing.” 

I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but I couldn’t even make a noise. My voice was gone as though it had never been. I shook my head again. _Don’t touch me,_ I thought. _If you touch me, it’s just giving me more to fantasize about later._

Luke searched my face. “I need you to tell me.” 

I reached up and gripped my throat. There weren’t words stuck there, wasn’t something I was trying to convey but couldn’t. I didn’t know what to tell him. My toes found his knee and I put light pressure on it; a silent plea for some space. 

Luke, stubbornly or ignorantly, didn’t move. He didn’t even seem to notice. His grip tightened on my thighs. “You seemed fine yesterday,” Luke said in what was clearly a leading tone of voice. 

I knew he wanted answers. Luke took care of me. If something was wrong, he wanted to know. I was so ashamed of myself that I couldn’t tell him. Admitting to pleasuring myself to Luke’s private moment wasn’t something I planned to do in this lifetime. My stomach heaved again but I still didn’t taste bile in the back of my throat. That was good at least.

It didn’t go unnoticed. Luke sat back on his haunches, putting a little bit of distance between us so that I didn’t throw up on him. The distance lasted all of two seconds before he put his hand to my forehead. Luke bit his lip. “You’re so cold,” he muttered more to himself than me. He had an expression on his face like concentration. I could practically see the wheels of his mind turning. 

I shivered in the robe, heated towels pooled around my ankles. _I miss my mom_ is what I meant to say but even though my lips formed the words, all that actually came out was a squeak that sounded vaguely like “mom.”

I had given Luke something to latch onto. The wrinkles on his forehead smoothed. He cupped my cheek with a warm hand. “I’m sorry,” he said and sounded so sincere for a lair. If he was really sorry then he would let me go so that I could be with her. 

There was nothing else to be done about it. Luke wasn’t letting me go. So we ate breakfast. It was hot omelettes, bacon, and orange slices and it warmed me from the inside out. 

Luke let me go back to bed after breakfast. I felt his eyes on me as I curled up in the sheet and faced the window. 

I slept on and off all day, only roused when I had to use the bathroom or share a meal with Luke. 

For his part, Luke watched me lay on the floor and seemed content to let me be silent. When the sun set, Luke took a bath by himself and went to bed. 

For all of the months that I had been imprisoned in Mount Othrys, I hadn’t had a single prophetic dream and I hadn’t spied - as Kelli called it - on anyone waking. That changed tonight. For the first time, I dreamed of the real Camp Half-Blood. 

Nico and Annabeth stood by the lake. It was pitch black outside. “I’ve been searching the Underworld, Annabeth, he isn’t there.” Nico’s voice was soft and frustrated. He was still angry with me. 

“Luke said that Percy is dead,” Annabeth insisted. Her voice was low too. They were out past curfew. “He even let me search his room and there was no sign of Percy.” 

My heart stopped beating for a full five seconds and then jump started into overdrive. Luke was telling them I was dead? He was telling people that I had died? Annabeth thought I was dead?

I heard the voice of the demigod whose neck had been snapped by Luke. _“Is that Percy Jackson? I thought you said he was dead.”_

And Luke’s voice, _“Did she see you?”_

I trembled like a leaf in the wind. My hands and feet grew cold, even in the dream. I couldn’t breathe. 

Then Annabeth dropped a bombshell. “Luke killed Tyson and Grover. It’s reasonable to assume that...that he let Percy die of his wounds.”

“If Percy is dead then I can’t find him. Luke might have killed the monsters but Percy is a demigod.” Nico frowned out at the lake. “The only thing I can think of is that Percy chose rebirth and was immediately sent back out into the world.” 

Chiron startled both Nico and Annabeth. “I’m afraid that it seems Annabeth is correct. Percy has perished. Poseidon mourns the loss of his son. It would be best to stay away from the oceans for now. I will inform his mother tomorrow.” Chiron looked tired and very old. He sighed. “You two go back to sleep now. It’s past curfew and the harpies will eat you. We don’t need anymore deaths.” 

Annabeth didn’t move. “Will we burn his shroud tomorrow too?” 

Chiron nodded.

Annabeth turned to Nico. “You had better be there.” 

Nico looked uncomfortable but he nodded. “Tomorrow, then.” Nico stepped into the shadows and was gone. 

I woke up, a scream caught in my throat and tears streaming down my face. I ran to the bathroom and screamed into one of the pillows. I screamed until my throat tore and then I kept screaming. They thought I was dead. They thought I was dead. They’ve all given up on me. Everyone gave up on me. My mom! They were going to tell my mom that I was dead! 

And I was trapped here. I was trapped forever or until one of the monsters got past Luke and killed me. Or...or maybe not. There was another way to escape. A more permanent way. But…but how could I do it? How? How? There had to be a way. There had to be something. I looked around for anything sharp. There was nothing, there was nothing here to… My eyes landed on the two-headed cat rug. The rug I was certain was alive. The rug that had sharp canine teeth. 

I dropped the pillow, ignored the spots of blood on it. Every breath hurt my throat. I moved towards the rug’s mouths on my knees, held out my arms. I’d been expecting it but the cat heads moving and snapping their jaws shut around my forearms startled me. What I wasn’t expecting was for them to chew me like a dog chews on a bone. I gritted my teeth so that I wouldn’t wake Luke. 

I dragged myself and the rug over to a patch of moonlight so that Artemis could watch me die for real. Blood pulsed out of my arms with every beat of my heart but it wasn’t fast. I heard the sick sounds of my flesh being torn, of teeth grinding against my bones. It hurt like nothing I’d ever felt before. Being eaten was a terrible way to die. I laid down and stared out the stained glass window and the puddle of my blood grew and grew and I got colder and colder. One of the rug’s heads took a bite out of my side. I made a small sound, then, an aborted noise that stuck in my throat. But I still didn’t die. 

Luke found me before I could die properly. Of course he did. I tried to fight him but I was too weak. All I did was get blood all over him. Luke dragged me to the slipper tub and dropped me into it. One hand went to my chest, the other twisted the knob on the faucet. The tub began to fill with water. Luke held me beneath the saltwater with both hands. 

I was so far gone that I could barely see Luke’s face. My vision was black and the terrible, terrible green of Greek Fire. I sent out a plea to Hestia; _I want to go home!_

The saltwater healed me against my will. I could feel my flesh regrowing and knitting back together. All I tasted was blood; in the water, in my gills. Strength poured into my limbs. Perks of being Poseidon’s son. I was completely healed when Luke let me go again. I screamed at him and hit him and tried to get away.

Luke caught me around the middle and held me to him. He was stronger than me on my best day and this was not my best day. 

In the end, I went limp. I just cried and cried and let Luke hold me. “If you won’t let me go then just kill me.”

“Gods no, Percy,” Luke groaned. “I can’t. I’m sorry, I can’t let you go and I can’t kill you.” 

His words only made me cry harder. “Why? Why? Kill me. Kill me. Just kill me.” I dissolved into sobs and the words stopped coming out but they still ran circles in my head. 

When I was done crying, wrung out and hollow, Luke stripped me down and pulled me into the shower with him to wash off the blood. It didn’t seem like the best course of action because I could drown him in the shower. 

But I didn’t care to. There was no way out. There was no escape. I couldn’t drown myself. I’d been trying for weeks, met with failure after failure, hoping and praying for help. But it wasn’t coming. Even the Gods thought I was dead. If I had any more tears to cry, they would have fallen. 

We were in the shower just long enough for the blood to swirl down the drain. Then Luke shut off the water and manhandled me out. He waited a couple of seconds, left me standing on the cold marble, before realizing I wasn’t going to dry myself off. Luke of course was completely dry except for his hair, which was still damp. I had no idea how he did it. I didn’t care. 

Luke toweled me off and it reminded me of my mom doing the same thing when I was very small. Fresh tears fell. When I was dry, he left me there with the towel draped over my shoulders. When he came back less than a second later, he had a glass of water in his hand. “Drink it,” he ordered. 

My eyes shifted to the puddle on the floor, black in the moonlight. It was my blood. I almost dropped the glass when he handed it to me. I drank it. It had a weird taste. This time, the cup did slip out of my fingers. It shattered on the floor between us. 

Luke caught me before I fell into a dead faint. 

When I came to, I thought I was laying in an actual bed. But no, I was still by the window. I was just laying on...a really big dog bed? It would be too small for Mrs. O’Leary but it would fit your average hellhound or fifteen year old boy just fine. Was I fifteen yet? Had my birthday passed? I still had Luke’s pillow and the sheet that I’d stolen from his bed but now there was another blanket, a knitted thing, thrown over me too. My hands were tied, in front this time. I couldn’t lift them past my navel. The rope tugged on the one that kept my legs tied together. 

I wiggled until I could see how he’d tied me. The knot work was intricate as always, though a little less elaborate than the harness and mermaid tail. The ending knot was behind my ankles and I couldn’t reach that either. I couldn’t move my hands down past my knees. How was I going to use the bathroom like this? I experimented with my range of motion and decided that I could probably stand up but definitely couldn’t walk. Whatever. 

I didn’t feel like going anywhere anyway. It took some fanangaling to get the blanket back up to my shoulder but I managed it and snuggled back down to sleep more. 

I knew Luke was watching me, but I didn’t even look at him. If I had to be here, I didn’t want to be awake for it. In my dreams, I screamed for Apollo or Hypnos or Morpheus. Someone had sent that dream to me. But none of the Gods acknowledged me. In their eyes, I was dead. What had I done to deserve this?

Over the next few days, Luke came and went. He didn’t try to talk to me. He wasn’t starving me this time, because sometimes he’d leave fruit or bread on the table by my armchair. I didn’t eat it. I did drink the water he left for me, but only because I was hoping it would be drugged. As hard as I tried, after four days, I was finding it hard to stay unconscious. 

Now that I was awake, I had to actually think about what I’d seen. Luke killed Grover and Tyson? It was impossible. Tyson, maybe. Even I could admit that. But not Grover, because Grover and I had an empathy link. Grover’s death should have killed me. Unless he saw it coming and broke the link before Luke killed him. 

It was a sick irony that Luke hadn’t lied about their fates: a monster had gotten them. Luke was the monster. How could I forget that he was evil?

One day, Luke got tired of me starving myself. It was his own fault, really. Going a few days without eating didn’t really bother me anymore. He hauled me up and dumped me in the chair. There was a plate of sliced peaches today. Luke picked one up. “You have to eat Percy.” 

Why? 

I didn’t meet his eye, didn’t look up at all. I was so tired. I felt sick. But not like the usual sick. I was soul sick. I opened my mouth. 

Luke put the slice in my mouth. His fingers touched my teeth, my tongue. 

I thought about biting him. I thought about spitting the fruit out. But it was sweet and I hadn’t eaten anything in a while. The juice trickled down the back of my throat. I waited until Luke’s fingers were out of my mouth to bite the peach in half and swallow it. 

Luke fed me peach slices one by one and I could taste the salt of his skin along with the sweetness of the peaches. Luke’s fingers glistened with my saliva and fruit juice. 

Looking at his wet fingers made me feel strange between my legs. It was a slow arousal, without the usual heat that came with an erection. Normally when I was horny, it came with heat and sparks and urgency. With this, I didn’t feel any inclination to do anything about it or even hide it. I couldn’t tell if I liked it, mostly because I didn’t feel anything except for emptiness. 

Luke fed me another peach. The pads of his fingers smoothed over my bottom lip as he pulled his hand away. 

What would he do if I sucked his fingers into my mouth and sucked them clean? I wasn’t sure where the thought came from, or why. It was weird that I was getting turned on now. That this was the first emotion I felt since trying to kill myself. It was...nice to feel something aside from despair. Maybe eating peaches was erotic and I was only now getting the memo. 

“Good boy, Percy,” Luke murmured as he fed me the last slice of peach. 

Oh, I felt that one. It was a burst of molten desire going from my abdomen to my dick, which was now leaking precum. I shifted my thighs together and hoped Luke didn’t notice. A traitorous voice in my head asked who cares if he notices? He’s going to do what he wants with you anyway. 

If Luke noticed, he didn’t give any indication of it. He cleaned off his hand and then my mouth with a damp napkin. Then he picked me up and carried me back to my bed on the floor. He set me on my back. 

I rolled so that my back was to him, so that I could look out the window. 

I felt Luke hesitate. Then he walked away. When he left the room, loneliness sank into me. I missed the sound of his breathing, of knowing I wasn’t the only living thing in this big, cold palace.

Why would a monster want to keep me alive and fed?

“Are you ever going to take these off?” I asked Luke, two weeks after my suicide attempt. My voice was hoarse from disuse. 

Luke masked his surprise quickly but I still saw it. “Can I trust you?” 

“Have you ever?” I shot back. 

Luke cocked his head as he appraised me. He got up and crouched beside my bed. Then he untied the ropes. “There isn’t anything in here for you to hurt yourself on. Except the Greek Fire. But you won’t be able to get to that, it’s the same as the windows.” 

How did he know? I asked him. 

Luke looked at me, something knowing and wild in his eyes. “Trial and error.” He massaged the feeling back into my limbs. This at least was familiar territory. “I’ve been there. But my fate is sealed and I can’t deviate from that no matter how hard I try.”

It took me a few moments to realize that when he said he’s been there, he meant that he’s been suicidal. It was all too easy to imagine Luke pacing the room, trying to find ways to kill himself and being unsuccessful. Was that why there were no weapons here? 

The look Luke gave me was like he’d read my thoughts. He nodded. “That’s why.” He massaged my ankle, careful with me like I'd shatter into glass. I was beginning to look skeletal, unhealthy like Nico Di Angelo, and my skin was unnaturally pale from a lack of sunlight. 

“Luke,” I said. “Why don’t you kill me? For real.” 

Luke studied my foot for a long few moments. Then he lifted his gaze to meet mine. There were bags beneath his eyes and worry wrinkles. “You’re tied to the fate of the world. But you’re also tied to my fate. The choice you make…”

“It might not be me,” I said, thinking of Nico. A few more years and he would be old enough. 

Luke shook his head. “It’ll be you. Kronos has plans for your sixteenth birthday.” 

Well that was just great. “I don’t suppose he’ll be throwing me a sweet sixteen?” 

Luke smiled grimly. “Not quite.” 

“Will you tell me his plan?” I knew it was a long shot but it didn’t hurt to ask. After all, I was never ever going to leave this place. 

Luke’s smile vanished. He dropped his gaze again. “No.” His brow furrowed. “You’ll probably be happy, though.” Softer he added, “if I can keep you alive that long.” 

The ropes came off but I still refused to eat. Even to myself, I wasn’t sure what I was trying to do. Starve to death? Make things harder for Luke? 

So we sat by the fire place with Luke’s chair pulled across to mine. Balanced on his knees was a small plate of red meat cut into bite-sized pieces. The smell was delicious and invoked hunger like nothing else could. He fed me slices of meat with his fingers. Silverware was no longer allowed because Luke didn’t trust me not to make another attempt. 

I opened my mouth and chewed and swallowed obediently. Meat made my stomach curl, just a little. It reminded me of the cat rug eating my flesh. There were faint pink scars, nearly the same color as my skin tone. “Why did you kill Tyson and Grover?”

Luke froze momentarily. I would have missed it if we hadn’t been spending months in close proximity. Then he said, “This is war, Percy.” He picked up a piece of meat and pressed it to my lips. 

Reluctantly, I ate it. Eating gave me time to think about Luke’s answer. “You couldn’t recruit them so you killed them.”

Luke nodded. “Tyson will be reborn in the same skin and will make his way back to earth eventually. Grover will become a bush or something in his next life.” Another piece of meat offered up. 

I chewed slowly. Luke was right. Tyson and Grover would both be back, although Grover would be changed forever. “Why didn’t the empathy link kill me?” 

A pained expression flitted across Luke’s face. “I told Grover to break it before I killed them.” 

“How did you know about it?” 

“Annabeth told me. I’d already killed Tyson and was going to kill Grover. She yelled at me before I could.” I couldn’t decipher Luke’s tone of voice. He pressed more meat into my mouth. “It was fast, Percy. They didn’t suffer. And I didn’t use Backbiter.”

I remembered something about Backbiter just then. It absorbed souls. There could be no rebirth if someone was killed by Backbiter. I choked on the meat in my mouth and swallowed it. Then I turned my face away. 

Luke washed his hands on the cloth and then brushed the tears off my face. “I’m sorry.”

Tears slid hot down my cheeks. “I thought Grover was your friend.”

Luke tapped his fingers against his knee and looked at the fire. “That’s why it was fast.”

I didn’t really want to know but I had to ask, “What’s slow?”

Luke met my eye again. His expression was grave, blue eyes haunted. “The army eating them.” His tone of voice told me that he had seen it and it wasn’t pretty. 

I shivered. My arms ached at the thought of it. Luke was still a bad person, but it could have been so much worse. 

I didn’t feel anything except tired and numb. It got to the point that I didn’t like feeling either of those things but even then, I couldn’t work up to actually being annoyed. It was like all of my emotions were under a gray blanket. 

Right after my suicide attempt, Luke had been all business. Feeding me, bathing me, dressing me. They were all done as efficiently as possible. Now that a few weeks had passed, Luke was relaxing a little. 

A bowl of sliced peaches rested on Luke’s lap. I hadn’t had peaches in a while, not since the first time, and the sight of them quickened my heart. Just a little. Just enough to be noticeable. Luke picked up a slice.

I leaned forward, mouth open. Doing so surprised both of us. But I wanted to feel something. 

Luke leaned back in surprise and then straightened again. He placed the peach in my mouth. 

I tasted the sweetness of the peach but also, for a second, the salt of Luke’s skin. My heart beat a little faster still. Last time, this had been erotic. I could still picture Luke’s fingers coated in my saliva and the juice from the peaches. It was clear as day in my mind. Arousal bloomed slowly, pooled out from my abdomen like hot honey. I swallowed the peach, leaned forward for another slice. 

“Okay, okay. Gods, Percy, you know you can feed yourself right?” Luke said as he placed another slice in my mouth. He didn’t look annoyed, and he hadn’t given me an order. 

So I ignored his comments and closed my mouth just enough that his nails scraped the roof of my mouth as he pulled his fingers away. By the time Luke’s hand made it to the bowl in his lap, I had bitten the peach in half and swallowed it. My mouth was open for more. Saliva pooled in my mouth. 

Luke fed me another slice. When he pulled his fingers away, a thread of saliva connected them to my lip. Luke seemed to find this very interesting judging by his expression. He rubbed his two fingers and thumb together, breaking the thread. Then he looked at me again. I couldn’t say what it was, but something seemed to click for him then. Luke picked up a slice of peach between his middle and pointer fingers. This time, his fingers lingered in my mouth. The pads ran over my teeth. 

I pushed my tongue up, crushed the peach between it and the roof of my mouth, and the sides of my tongue brushed against Luke’s fingers. My mind jumped from Luke’s wet fingers to the close up view I’d had of his dick. How it had been wet like this - maybe not like this - and I drooled. What if it was his dick glistening wet with my saliva? Did I even want it in my mouth? The low heat in my belly said yes, yes I did want Luke’s dick in my mouth. If this was how his fingers made me feel, imagine his dick. 

_What’s wrong with you?_

_I just want to feel something._

Luke’s pupils dilated until the blue of his eyes were just thin rings. He licked his lips and shifted in his seat. One by one, the peach slices were fed to me and Luke’s fingers just kept getting slicker and wetter with a combination of fruit juice and my saliva. 

The sight made me ache with want. I was hard again, dick straining against the fabric of the chiton. On the last slice, I shoved the peach into my cheek and licked Luke’s fingers.

Luke looked like he didn’t want to pull his fingers out of my mouth. He took his time, the calloused pads of his fingers rough against my tongue and lower lip. “Bed, Percy.” Luke’s voice was low and rough. I could see his pulse fluttering in the hollow of his throat. 

I rose slowly, acutely aware that with me standing and Luke sitting this close, there was no way to hide my erection. 

I didn’t get to do more than stand before Luke stood too. We were suddenly chest to chest, hip to hip. For a few heartbeats we were still. Then Luke was gone. 

That night, sometime after we both laid down to go to sleep, I heard Luke moan and opened my eyes to look. I couldn’t feel guilty about watching him because Luke killed my brother and my best friend. 

The leg closest to me was drawn up to his chest, knee near his shoulder. Luke’s left hand was pushing that object into his body and his right...The fingers of Luke’s right hand were in his mouth. He made whining, whimpering noises as he sucked on and licked his fingers. 

I was hard in seconds. I drew the sheet up over my nose so that if Luke glanced my way, he wouldn’t see my fingers sliding into my own mouth. With my other hand, I gripped my dick. Was I really going to do this again? Just to chase a feeling? Yeah. I guess I was. I kept an eye on Luke through my lashes and kept the movement of my hand slow and subtle. 

Luke was a sight to behold. Pleasure made Luke even more beautiful than he normally was. He arched his spine up off the bed as he tried to get the right angle, hand moving the object in and out. Luke moaned around his fingers. They were wet and glistened with saliva. His arm shook. I couldn’t see his dick from this angle but I could guess that it was pretty pink and leaking onto his stomach. 

Sucking on his fingers had to be a coincidence. He wasn’t doing it because _I’d_ been sucking on his fingers earlier. Honeyed pleasure built within me. I watched the movement of Luke’s wrist while he fucked himself. The angle didn’t look overly comfortable. It would be so much easier if Luke had someone else do it for him, or better yet, if he had the real thing. _He could have me,_ I thought as I worked my hand along the length of my dick. _It could be me inside of him._ I curled my fingers around the head of my dick, moved in circles, slicking my palm with precum. It felt so good, sharp bursts of pleasure that had me panting quietly through my open mouth. 

Luke’s breathing changed as he got closer and held his breath for long seconds at a time. He pulled his fingers from his mouth and yes they were wet and glistening then moved that hand to his dick. 

We came at the same time.


	8. Terrified

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy avoids getting his cherry popped and feels conflicted about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you want some PJO hot takes? Stop on by my side blog, [luke-x-percy](https://luke-x-percy.tumblr.com/).

Luke got dressed in the camouflage pants and white tank top that he wore when there was a battle. He had left enough food for me for a week, stacked up on two side tables. Before he left, Luke paused to look at me. 

I laid on my dog bed and freed one hand to wave goodbye. 

Luke returned the wave, took a deep breath, and then left. 

Day eight of Luke being gone didn’t concern me. Neither did day nine. Day ten brought a trickle of anxiety. My supply of food was quickly dwindling. 

By day twelve, the food was gone and the monsters came. Luke never locked his door because everyone knew to stay out. But the door opened, which was clue enough that something was wrong. Luke teleported straight into his room when he returned; he never used the door except to leave. 

I hid beneath Luke’s bed, sheet wrapped around me in an attempt to hide my own scent and look like an inconspicuous pile of blankets. I told myself that I had been here for months and I used Luke’s soaps so I had to smell like him. They wouldn’t be able to pick out my scent. 

The monsters didn’t stay long. They just walked around the room and wondered about the pet bed. Then they got creeped out and left. 

The encounter was short but scary. I stayed beneath Luke’s bed for the rest of the day. 

I went two more days before realizing that I couldn’t just sit here and wait. My stomach growled at me, demanding to be filled. Humans could go quite a while without eating, demigods could go longer. But we still got terribly weak and there was the chance that Luke wouldn’t return at all. 

_Don’t think about that._

So if I wanted to be strong - just in case - I needed food. Which meant that I would need to leave Luke’s room. The very thought made me nauseous with anxiety. I would have to make a run for the kitchen. Not that I had any idea where that was but if I didn’t at least try to find it... Not finding the kitchen wasn’t an option. 

I went into the closet and looked around. There were no weapons. Unless you counted the selection of belts. Belts didn’t do a lot against monsters. I pulled on one of Luke’s dress shirts, fingers fumbling with the buttons. It had been so long since I’d done buttons and most of my clothes before this didn’t have them. The shirt hung down to mid thigh. I looked for a pair of pants that didn’t have pockets but all I found was a leather pair that creaked when I moved. I slid on a pair of Luke’s boxer briefs instead. They were a little big but it was better than running around Kronos’ palace with my dick out. 

Once I was dressed, I looked again for a weapon. There was nothing...except the bronze balls Luke had given me. I hefted one. This would have to do.

It took me ten minutes to work up the courage to unlock Luke’s door and another ten minutes to make myself open it. The hallway was empty. I crept out into it and closed Luke’s door softly behind me. My heart pounded so hard it was painful. I had hoped that by wearing Luke’s clothes, I could mask my own scent. At least a little bit. But that wouldn’t do any good if the monsters could smell the fear on me. 

I looked in either direction. The hallway looked identical. I went left, sticking close to the wall and trying to keep my footsteps light. My hands were so sweaty that I worried about dropping the ball. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck between my shoulder blades. Every step I took away from Luke’s room was a step away from safety. 

There were other doors on this floor, all of them identical and placed at forty foot intervals. Apparently Kronos’ army didn’t need signs to navigate because there were none. I found myself holding my breath as I walked, ears straining for even the slightest sound. But all I heard was the soft hiss of Greek Fire lamps and the whisper of cold wind; the same as in Luke‘s room. Halfway to the stairs was an alcove in the wall. 

I caught a glimpse of the monster from the corner of my eye and almost screamed. The bronze ball sailed across the hall and I heard metal strike metal and then thunk to the floor. The sound was unnaturally loud in the quiet palace. The monster didn’t attack, or even react. And I realized that it was a statue. Just a statue of a horse with...canine teeth in its mouth. One of Geryon’s flesh-eating horses. It now had a sizable dent in its face. 

My hands were too slippery with sweat to pick up the ball the first try. I wiped them on Luke’s shirt and tried again. I was so scared that I was shaking. This was only the first hallway. I’d probably alerted every monster in the palace to my presence. My heart pounded so hard that every beat hurt. 

But I needed to eat. So I kept walking. I made it to the stairwell. It was narrow compared to the hallway and spiraled both up and down. If we were as high up as Luke said, then the kitchen was probably downstairs. I took it one step at a time, clutching the bronze ball tightly and keeping my back pressed to the wall. This was a terrible place to be. If a monster caught me in here, I would be dead for real. Sweat trickled down the side of my face. I didn’t wipe it away. 

Five flights of stairs later, I smelled food. Cooking meat was the strongest smell and I recognized it as Apollo’s sacred red cows. The smell made me weak with hunger. I followed it out of the stairwell. As I did, I heard the sounds of monsters; growls and barks, cackling laughter and angry yells. I heard the _clipclop_ of hooves and scratching of claws on marble, the snap of leather wings, the dull scrape of metal dragging. 

I came to an entryway that led into the dining room. The entryway was full of dining carts that held spare silverware and pitchers of beer. It was dark, in this space between the dining room and hallway. I hid and peered into the dining room. 

There were hoards of monsters. They crowded in the massive room, hundreds to a table. The noise they made was almost deafening. If there was food on the tables, I couldn’t see it because these monsters had no sense of manners. They climbed onto the tables or were dragged onto the tables and into another monster’s open mouth. There was carnage everywhere, meat and golden dust covered the floor. 

Scattered between them were demigods, doing their best not to get eaten. One monster snatched up a girl and took a bite out of her leg. Only for another monster to grab onto the girl’s other leg. A third took her torso and a fourth her head. 

“You can’t do that!” A human voice screamed. “Luke will -“

“Luke isn’t here!” Came the rocky voice of a monster. It was followed by laughter. The protesting demigod was ripped in half and eaten. 

I almost threw up but there was nothing to throw up in my stomach. I dry heaved and put both hands over my mouth to muffle the sound. 

The monsters nearest to me were sniffing the air, like they could smell me. A few of them got up from their seats. 

I backed away as quietly as I could. And ran into a body. 

A hand clamped around my mouth and another wrapped around my waist. “Shh,” Luke said. “It’s just me.” He pulled me backwards, away from the dining room full of monsters. 

A monster poked its head out and saw us. It opened its mouth to call the others. 

Luke grabbed two butter knives off a cart and threw them. They landed in the monster's eyes. 

The monster screamed as it went blind. Its screams got the other monsters riled up. 

Luke spun me around. He looked exhausted and scared but there was also a grim determination in his eyes. “Can you find your way back to my room?” Luke asked me.

I nodded. My knees shook. Luke’s room was safe. Luke’s room was safe. Luke’s room was safe because no one was allowed in there except for me and Luke. Luke would kill anyone else who entered his room. I bolted. 

I heard fighting, shouting, behind me. Screams of pain but they didn’t belong to Luke. There was a roar of rage and that did belong to Luke. 

Rule number one: don’t run in front of a predator because it activates their prey drive. 

A monster chased me up the stairs. There wasn’t anything within reach to kill it with. No convenient statues holding weapons, no weapons mounted on the walls, not even anything that looked like a weapon. Just long empty hallways with doors that led to who knows where. The bronze ball was lost. I didn’t remember losing it but it wasn’t in my hands. 

I wasn’t actually sure that I could find my way back to Luke’s room. I ran up the stairs, around and around, dizzy with fear and hunger. Every hallway looked the same to me, every floor was identical. But then I recognized some of the statues and followed them. There weren’t a lot of doors on Luke’s floor. I ran past the fleshing-eating horse statue that I had dented. 

The monster chased me, growling and excited. I didn’t understand what it was saying but I knew it was looking forward to eating me. Luke’s room, Luke’s room, Luke’s room. 

There! A door that didn’t stand out from the others at all except I had a feeling about it. I yanked it open and bolted inside. I slammed the door shut on the monster’s claw and locked it. The claws scrabbled at the wood but the monster was caught; it couldn’t get in or out. It roared. 

I backed away until my knees hit the bed and I sank onto it. There was nothing in the room to defend myself with. Not a single gods-damned thing. None of the panels on the walls would open for me. I’d already learned that the windows and mirrors wouldn’t break. And then, I noticed that the chairs were made of wood. 

I picked up one of the chairs and threw it against the wall with all of my strength. A leg splintered. I ripped the leg off and held it in both hands, ready for a fight. 

The monster's hand suddenly dissolved into golden sand. 

The lock on the door clicked open. 

I hid on the other side, ready to hit whatever was coming for me. 

Luke only avoided a chair leg to the face because he was fast. He caught me in his arms and yanked my makeshift weapon out of my hands. 

Relief was the first thing I felt, flooding my veins so fast and hitting me so hard that I almost didn’t think about it before I threw my arms around his neck. “Luke!” I gasped. 

Luke’s hands came around my waist and he leaned against the door to close it. He was covered in monster dust despite not having a weapon. His heart pounded. 

Or maybe that was my own heart I was feeling. We stood there together panting, catching our breath. My legs felt like they were going to give out. Slowly, it dawned on me what I had done. I tried to stay relaxed but I couldn’t stop my muscles from stiffening. 

Luke didn’t move. Something hot and wet soaked into my shirt and I smelled blood. 

I pulled back and Luke let me go, hands falling to his sides. Dark blood soaked through his shirt and down into his camouflage pants. “You’re hurt!” I accused him. 

Luke took a few careful breaths. He pushed himself off the door and walked over to the panel that hid the mini fridge. 

I followed him. “I thought you couldn’t get hurt,” I said and I was angry. It felt like he’d lied to me. 

Luke bent over to get the nectar and blood gushed from the wound. It dripped onto the floor. His face visibly paled. “Small wounds,” he corrected me, voice tight with pain. “Was already hurt. Fucker got half my liver.” 

My eyes widened. Guilt rose in me swiftly. So that’s why he didn’t come back when he said he would. “I thought you were dead.” It was only after I said it that I realized it was true. I really thought Luke was dead because he’d been gone for five days longer than he was supposed to be and there were monsters in his room. 

“Not that lucky,” Luke muttered darkly. He drank the entire vial of nectar. 

“There were monsters in your room!” I said, desperate, hoping he would understand. I’d hid beneath his bed to avoid them. But if monsters were coming into Luke’s room, then I thought he must be dead.

Luke grunted. He staggered towards his bed. 

I darted out in front of him. “Wait,” I said, and tugged Luke’s tank top from his pants. “You’re going to get blood all over the sheets.” Luke hated being dirty. I think it was because he’d lived on the streets, where it was hard to come by soap and a shower. 

Luke looked like he wanted to argue but was going to pass out and couldn’t spare the energy. He let me strip him naked without any protest. There was blood on his skin and a hole in his side from where the monster had taken a piece of his liver. The skin was slowly trying to knit itself back together but it was tough work. He would need more nectar. 

I focused, felt a tug in my gut, and pulled water from the tap. Not salt water, just plain old drinking water. I very carefully used it to wash the blood off his skin and then sent it back to the nearest drain. 

Luke watched me dully. He didn’t comment on my ability. When he was cleaned up, he moved around me and eased himself into the bed. Luke sighed. “Come here,” he said to me. 

I hesitated, considered refusing. Luke couldn’t punish me until he was better. But I was too used to coming when he called. I climbed into bed beside him and lay on his good side. I didn’t touch him. 

Luke crooked a finger, urging me closer. He looked pretty pathetic. 

It wasn’t like he could _make_ me. I could probably even say I was scared of hurting him and he’d let it go. I inched closer and closer. I put my head on his chest, every muscle in my body tensed to run. 

Luke slipped an arm around me and sighed again. I felt him relax, heard the steady beating of his heart against my ear. 

I fell into an uneasy sleep, jolting awake and sitting bolt upright whenever I heard something in the hallway. My heart beat so fast. I stared across the dark room towards the large doors and remembered that we hadn’t locked them. 

I woke Luke up every time I did this. He’d make crooning noises and pull me back down to his side. “Shh,” he whispered. “We’re safe. We’re safe, Percy.” 

I settled back down, my chin on his chest, watching the doors until I fell asleep again. I was convinced that someone would come in to punish Luke for killing so much of the army or that someone would realize I was there and I was alive. For the first time, I actually understood why Luke had told them I was dead. Yes, they were chasing me because I was prey, but imagine how much harder they would have run if they knew I was Percy Jackson. 

The sun rose and no one had come for us. I was tired and on edge. Luke was still hurt and I wasn’t sure if he would punish me for leaving his room, even if I had a good reason. I stared at the doors so hard that I could see them even when my eyes were closed. 

Luke woke up shortly after me, groaning softly with pain. He looked at me, still laying against his side, watching the doors again. 

I watched him from the corner of my eye, noticed that he didn’t look so pale today. 

“Percy,” he murmured. 

I turned my face to him. I don’t know how I knew, but his expression said that he wanted to kiss me. If I let Luke kiss me, I’d be giving away what little autonomy I had left. These past few weeks had taught me several hard lessons: Luke was safer than the alternative, I was horrifically attracted to him, and if I was going to be trapped here then I might as well make the most of it. I lowered my face towards his.

At the same time, Luke lifted his head off the pillow. 

We kissed and it felt as exceptionally ordinary as rain tapping against the window and steam rising off a mug of hot chocolate and a thousand other homely things. I hadn’t expected that kissing Luke would feel this way. I expected instant horniness or disgust or a mixture of the two. But I wasn’t horny and Luke’s lips felt nice against mine. 

When we parted, Luke’s eyes were tender and soft and I realized for the first time that he was going to fall in love with me. I kissed Luke again because I was afraid that he wouldn’t see the same thing in my eyes. But more than that, I was afraid he would. 

It was bizarrely intimate and chaste, considering everything that I’d seen and heard and fantasized about. We must have been laying in bed for half an hour doing nothing but kissing and let me tell you, it was a good half hour. 

“I feel gross,” Luke said the next time we parted. “You got blood on my shirt.” 

“I really pegged you when I said you were the God of the bath,” I said with a roll of my eyes. The shirt was easy to slip over my head, even though there was blood crusted on it. I threw it to the floor. “Better?”

Luke had watched me many times before but now he let his gaze travel slowly over my torso in a way that made me hot all over. “Much.” 

For the first time, I was the one who helped Luke into the bathroom. I supported him, an arm around his waist, and set him down on the bench beneath the window. 

I drew the bath for Luke in his usual bathing spot. 

Luke eased himself into the water with a hiss of discomfort. Then he looked to me. 

I knew what he wanted without him asking. I slipped out of his boxers and into the water. This was my first time being in the sunken tub. It felt strange and I felt strange and awkward. My heart thundered so loudly that I was sure he could hear it. It was weird to think that a few weeks ago, I was imagining sucking his dick just to feel something besides numbness. Now I was so scared that it felt like a live wire running through my veins. 

Luke took my hands and urged me closer, until I was practically in his lap. My leg brushed against his, skin smooth beneath the water. And then Luke kissed me. 

I liked kissing Luke but I definitely had another motive: maybe if I kissed him enough, Luke would forget that I’d broken the rules. So I swallowed my fear and I kissed Luke back. Before I knew it, I was straddling him, my hands cupping his face and one of his holding the back of my head. Kissing Luke eased my nerves a little and I let myself relax enough to admit that I liked this angle better, liked being chest to chest with him. I was hyper aware that this was how he’d fucked Kelli, that she’d sat on his lap while he fucked her. But he’d never kissed her. I was sure of it now. 

Luke kissed me sweetly, only occasionally running his tongue or teeth across my lips. The fingers of Luke’s other hand dipped down my spine. 

I shivered and opened my mouth. This kiss was a little dirtier, my tongue rubbing against Luke’s. It reminded me of licking his fingers, of the weight of a peach slice on my tongue, except Luke tasted like blood. The blood taste didn’t diminish the arousal that slowly heated within me. It was easily the sexiest thing I’ve ever done; our lips pressed together and tongues sliding. Would he be upset that I was getting hard? Or worse, would he want to move past kissing? There was no way I could hide it from him, not like this. I tried to pull away. 

Luke let me break the kiss but he held me tighter. His pupils were dilated again, a light blush colored his cheeks. He looked so handsome. “What’s wrong, Percy?” 

“I-I…” I tried to angle my hips away from him. We were naked and sitting so close, it seemed stupid to try to hide how turned on I was but I really, really didn’t want him to know. Maybe Luke only liked fucking himself and didn’t want me to fuck him. Maybe he was only interested in fucking other people, like he had with Kelli. What if _that_ was my punishment? 

Luke was having none of it. He pulled me in so close that my erection was trapped between our abdomens. 

“L-let...don’t…” I couldn’t even say it. I squirmed to get away. Squirming didn’t help. 

Realization dawned on Luke’s face. “Hey, it’s okay. It’s normal to get hard while you’re kissing someone.” He didn’t let me retreat so much as an inch. His grip on my hips was so hard I was sure there would be imprints of his fingers left on my skin. Luke shifted. “See?” 

I felt something firm and warm pressed against my ass. 

“I’m hard too,” Luke murmured. He shifted again and his dick rubbed against my skin again. 

I froze. Oh my gods. _Oh my gods._ That was his dick. I was feeling his dick and he was right it was hard and it felt so big. He wasn’t...he wasn’t going to put that inside of me, was he? It _was_ punishment. I should have known he wouldn’t let it go. I should have known. Luke always punished me. “I-I don’t…I haven’t ever…” My whole body shook with fear and humiliation and a teeny, tiny bit of arousal. “Ever…” Why couldn’t I just say it? I’ve never had sex, I’ve never had a hand job, I’ve never even kissed anyone before Luke. It was so hard to breathe. What was wrong with me? I couldn’t breathe…

“Hey, hey, Percy,” Luke said, voice calm and grip loosening on me. “Look at me.” He turned my face towards him, trying to meet my eyes.

I was looking right through Luke, couldn’t focus on him even though he was right in front of my face. How was it I could face down monsters, backtalk Gods, save the world, but the second actual sex was brought up, I couldn’t even pull air into my lungs? And the worst part of it all was that I was still hard and my shaking made my dick rub against Luke’s abs in a delicious way. 

Hands cupped my face and Luke pulled me forward until our noses were touching and there was no where to look except in his eyes. “Percy,” Luke breathed. He still tasted like blood. “We don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.” 

It took a few long moments for my brain to dissect the words he’d said and turn them into something that made sense. It felt like a trick, like Luke was testing me. What happened if I refused him? Maybe this wasn’t supposed to be a punishment but it could easily turn into one if I didn’t satisfy him. _Just calm down,_ I told myself. This was just another battle, just another thing I had to do to survive. My breathing slowly returned to normal. “Okay,” I whispered. Then I tilted my head and kissed Luke again. 

Luke hissed through his teeth as I brushed up against his side. 

“Hey!” I accused. “You’re injured.” Thank the Gods that Luke was injured. It gave me a good excuse to tell him no. 

Luke sighed and the fact that he didn’t argue only proved that he was still hurt pretty bad. He leaned forward and kissed me again, a brief brush of his lips to mine. “I don’t heal in water like you do.” 

Relief and disappointment flooded through me in equal measure. My emotions were a kaleidoscope of glass. I eased off of Luke’s lap and stood up. “You should have taken a shower.” My dick was still hard and tantalizingly close to Luke’s face. I took a step backwards. 

Luke looked at my dick for a few moments then back up to my face. “I like baths.”

It was later and I had to be careful with how much ambrosia I fed Luke because if he caught a fever, I couldn’t just dump him in the bath and let the water heal him. Luke would drown. I still hadn’t eaten anything in three days. My stomach growled loudly. 

Luke heard and winced. “I know you’re hungry. I’m sorry. Just give me a couple hours.” Then he laid back on his pillows and promptly fell asleep. 

I spent the time that Luke was asleep studying his face. We had kissed a lot since dawn. Luke was my first kiss. I always thought...well I kind of thought Annabeth would have been my first kiss. I’m pretty sure that the only reason my cherry wasn’t popped was because Luke was too hurt for sex. Even though he said we could stop when I wanted. 

I didn’t believe him. Luke was tricky. He’d said that monsters got Grover and Tyson, which wasn’t a lie but also wasn’t the whole truth. I already knew that Luke was tricky. I’d just forgotten. I wouldn’t underestimate him again. The real question and the one I couldn't find an answer to was this: when the time came, would I care that Luke had tricked me?


	9. Entertained

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They have a ton of sex.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm a week late because this fic was really bringing me down emotionally and also because sex is actually super hard to write. Did I start writing a new, fluffier fic? Maybe. Possibly. Yes. Anyway, this chapter is literally nothing but sex so if you don't like fucking then...don't read it.

It would be reasonable to assume that we took things slow. That we kissed and left it at that and just ignored how turned on it made us. Because I was scared, because I didn’t know what I was doing, because I didn’t trust Luke. 

Anyone who thought that would be mistaken. They would be missing the facts. 

Which were that we were in close company for extended periods of time, we were both horny, and the most important factor: sex gave us something to do. 

That made it sound like we jumped straight into fucking, like Luke had with Kelli, but that wasn’t the case at all. It wasn’t like that at all. 

I ran into a problem pretty early on. Whenever Luke kissed me, all I wanted to do was kiss him back. It turned out that I loved kissing. I liked it wet, dry, soft, hard, passionate, innocent, with teeth and tongue. Any way you could kiss, I wanted to do it. 

Luke made me see stars whenever he touched me. He drove me to pleasure so high that I saw white, that my body contorted when I came. He drew every type of moan from my throat, pushed my voice to its limits in both directions. Every new thing we did was a higher, sharper, hotter, more brilliant ecstasy. Just when I thought that we’d reached the peak and there was no way it could be better, Luke showed me how wrong I was. 

When Luke touched me, I forgot about escape. I forgot about the war, about the dead, about being abandoned here. All I knew was our bodies together. It was addicting. It was a form of escape. 

A few days later, Luke’s wound was mostly healed. All that was left was a dark red mark over his liver; skin that was still healing. We lay on our sides, Luke’s face level with my chest. His open mouth pressed against my chest, tongue made small circles around the nipple. He used alternating pressures; light flicks and hard licks. 

Pleasure centered around my chest, small bursts of pleasure. I couldn’t stay still, couldn’t decide what to do with my body. I pushed my chest into Luke’s mouth when the pressure was too heavy and pulled away when it was too light. 

Luke held me tight, legs tangled in mine and arms wrapped around me to keep me from going too far. My wriggling didn’t seem to bother him, he moved with me; kept his tongue steadily lapping at my nipple. Luke was hard and I could feel his erection against my bare thigh. His skin was smooth as velvet, hot and firm, and precum leaking from the head of his penis and onto my skin. He closed his mouth around my nipple and sucked.

Pleasure burst through me. I closed my eyes, tossed my head back, arched into Luke’s mouth. Distantly I was aware that I was clawing at Luke’s back, could feel his skin beneath my nails. My hips jerked forward, my dick pressing into his abs. We’d only been doing this kind of thing for a couple of days but it was already obvious even to me that I made a lot more precum than Luke did. His abs glistened with it. 

As he pulled off, Luke scraped his teeth against my nipple. He looked up at me.

I ducked my head to kiss him hard. 

Luke rolled us over and slid between my thighs, body spreading my legs apart. He rocked his hips down and our dicks slid together. His lips never left mine, kissing me the whole while and swallowing down my moans. 

It felt so good. So much better than my hand ever had. My hips jerked up and another smooth glide of our dicks. I gripped the sheets in both hands and whined. 

We ground against each other, skin sliding against skin. Luke kept us lined up, kept the pace steady; if not maddeningly slow. His breathing was uneven and his blond curls stuck to his forehead with sweat. He kissed my jaw, my neck, mouth open and tongue occasionally darting out. When he moaned it was a low rumble in his throat like a big cat. He pulled his head back to look me in the face. “Do you want to cum?” Luke asked. 

I hesitated, back teeth clenched, trying to clear my head. I couldn’t get through the haze of lust that fogged my thoughts. What did I want? More, more, more, my brain supplied. “Yes!” 

Luke’s hand curled around both of our dicks. He slid his hand up. His fingers brushed over the heads, gathering precum and then slid back down. 

I tipped my head back and moaned. Getting off by myself was pretty okay. Getting off with Luke was fifty times better. Luke’s palms were calloused and he knew just what to do with his hands - and mouth and dick - to make it feel so good. I was hot, so hot and the cold of the palace didn’t touch me at all. Precum oozed onto my belly, making a clear pool on my navel. I opened my eyes to slits to look between us. 

I watched Luke’s hand rhythmically stroke our dicks. Luke’s dick was rogue, a sweet red color. Now that we were literally dick-to-dick, I saw that we were the same length but Luke was a little bit thicker around than me. The head was shiny with precum and veins ran along the shaft. Gods, that was hot. Unbearably hot. I let my head fall back into the pillow and moaned through parted lips. 

Luke caught my lips in a bruising kiss without his rhythm faltering. He moaned against my mouth. “Come on, Percy,” he murmured. “Cum for me.” 

He felt so good and I didn’t want to disappoint him. It felt like I was cumming on command but that didn’t diminish how sweet release felt. The noise I made when I came was small and high and embarrassing. I came with a shiver and squeezed Luke’s waist with my knees. 

Luke rutted against me, didn’t stop until he’d cum too. It wasn’t the most impressive orgasm I’d seen from him; Luke just tensed and then came on me. The grind of his hips slowed as he milked the last drops of pleasure from both of us. 

I was so sensitive after cumming that I wriggled and whined but I couldn’t get away from Luke’s touch. It was a relief when he orgasmed, coating my belly with white ropes of cum. There was an excessive amount of cum on me and it was warm and gross. My own cum was bad enough; I didn’t need double the amount. “I need a shower,” I said and winced at how whiny my tone was. 

Luke laid on top of me and wiggled. It took me a second to realize he was _rubbing it in._ “No,” he said and kissed me. 

Despite that initial no, Luke couldn’t resist the pull of the bath so we did, in fact, get cleaned up. We even took separate baths. 

I was glad for that because I needed some normalcy. We were moving fast enough that my head spun with it but still slower than I knew we could be going. The part of me that wanted a distraction was at war with the part of me that hated Luke. 

Luke kept me from my friends and family, hoarding me away like a dragon hoarding treasure. He let the world think I was dead so that they wouldn’t come looking. I didn’t want to forgive him for that. 

I didn’t sink completely below the surface of the water in the tub today. There was something I wanted to try and I needed to keep an eye on Luke to do it. I kept everything below my eyes beneath the surface of the water and leaned against the side of the tub. My hand inched downwards, between my legs, past my balls. I’d never even thought of doing this before. But I thought that I should figure things out before Luke wanted something I wasn’t quite ready to give him. 

Touching my hole felt weird and strangely exciting. The skin was wrinkled and every brush of my fingers made me clench up. _How_ was anything supposed to fit inside of me? How did Luke do it? Would he let me try? I gave myself a mental shake and focused on what I was doing. Somehow, I needed to get my finger inside of myself but the more I tried, the tenser I became. After a few minutes of trying and not succeeding, I gave up and slid beneath the surface of the water. 

After that time, I tried again during our next bath and made more progress. I could get the very tip of my finger inside of me. It felt so much better than I thought it would and suddenly I understood why Luke liked this so much. My nerves were alight with pleasure. I may have been fingering myself - or trying to - but I imagined it was Luke’s body instead of my own. I ached to make him feel this good. My dick was hard but I didn’t stroke it because I knew that Luke would want to make me cum later. 

We got off together every day. My first handjob (giving) and blowjob (receiving) happened in the closet and happened one right after the other. Luke herded me toward a mirror and pressed hot against my back. “Watch,” he whispered. His hand curled around my dick, stroked me to hardness. 

I watched, strangely fascinated by seeing it from a different angle. His hand felt good on me, bigger than my own hand and rougher. In a matter of minutes, I was rolling my hips, fucking into his hand. Shortly after that, I came on the mirror. My legs felt weak. 

Luke turned me around and crowded into my personal space to kiss me. His penis was rigid, pressed firm against my belly. He took my hand and guided it to his dick. Luke kept his hand over mine, showing me how to touch him, how much pressure to give. His mouth was on mine the whole time, tongue licking into my mouth and rubbing against mine. 

I was dizzy from cumming. It felt strange to hold someone else’s penis in my hand. But by the Gods, I didn’t hate it. It was fascinating to see how much I could affect Luke with just my hand, to feel him shiver when I swiped my palm over the head, to feel him buck into my touch as I tightened my grip. 

When Luke came, it was on me. He stood panting for a moment; his hand still curled around mine, keeping my hand still. Then he let go and slowly sank his knees. Luke licked every drop of cum off of my skin. 

His tongue tickled, made my stomach flutter. There was nothing within reach to hold onto except for Luke’s head. My fingers threaded through his hair. 

Luke kept licking me clean, gazing up at me through his lashes. 

I alternated between squeezing my eyes shut and looking back at him. This was so weird. I didn’t know you could eat cum, or why you would want to. I was getting hard again. It had been less than five minutes and I was getting hard again. Gods, did I want Luke this much? 

By the time my abdomen had been licked clean, I was fully hard again. Luke sat back on his heels for a moment, studying my face. Whatever he saw in my expression seemed to cement his thoughts. He leaned forward and took the head of my dick in his mouth. 

The feeling of Luke’s hot, wet mouth was incredible. I moaned and my eyes slid shut. 

Luke pulled off, gave my dick a few kittenish licks. “Such a pretty little cock,” he muttered. Then he took me in his mouth again. 

My hands were still in Luke’s hair and they tightened automatically. I trembled as pleasure sparked in my...cock. He’d called it a cock. 

Luke bobbed his head.

I moaned. It felt so good. I didn’t think it could feel this good. 

Then, Luke took me to the root. His throat was tight around the first couple inches of my cock. Luke’s mouth pooled with saliva and precum and he was drooling with it. He kept his eyes on my face as he hollowed his cheeks and slowly pulled back.

I wanted to stay engulfed in that wet heat forever. The friction felt good but I still whined with the loss. 

Luke bobbed his head, taking to the base only to pull back to the head a few heartbeats later. He lightly, lightly dragged his teeth along the length of my cock.

I came down his throat. 

I lay on my back on Luke’s bed, a place that I was finding myself more and more. It was hard to believe that before a week or so ago, I’d never even touched this bed. Now I spent most of my time on it. I curled my hands in the sheets and thrust my hips up, forcing my cock deeper into Luke’s mouth. 

Luke barely stopped me from choking him. His hand was between his legs, stroking his dick while he sucked me off. When he pulled off my cock, his breath was uneven. “You’re gonna kill me, sweetheart,” he said. Then he narrowed his eyes in thought. Luke turned around and swung one leg over my body. His cock was about level with my face. “Keep yourself occupied,” he said with a smirk. Then he dropped down to his elbows and sucked my cock back into his mouth. 

Idly, I wondered if I _could_ kill Luke with my dick. Maybe. I licked the side of Luke’s cock. The taste was familiar to me now, and excited me even more. My mouth watered for it and that made a hot flush of embarrassment course through me. Who would have thought that I’d be so excited to suck cock? Not me. Never in my wildest dreams. I pulled just the head into my mouth and sucked lightly, teasing. 

Luke moaned around my cock, sending vibrations through it. His hips twitched like he wanted to thrust deeper - he knew he could, he knew I wouldn’t choke - but he kept himself in check. He brought his hands to my thighs, running his palms over my skin. 

I glanced up and almost sank my teeth into Luke’s cock. Thankfully, I caught myself in time because if I hadn’t then Luke would probably start beating me. But I was so goddamn _angry_ by what I saw. 

Luke had that stupid thing he used to fuck himself inside of him. The black, flared base was clearly visible outside of his body. _Why_ did he need that when I was right here? I didn’t know that you could be angry while giving a blowjob but I found out fast. I wanted to ask him why he used that thing instead of me. If he liked being full so much, _I was right here._ I lowered my eyes to where Luke was sucking me off like he couldn’t get enough of the taste of me. He liked sucking cock. A lot. Maybe he wanted to be full on both ends. Well, I couldn’t do that...

Luke pulled off _again._ “Hey,” he said, looking at me along the length of our bodies. “You can touch it if you want but don’t let my toy distract you that much.” Then his mouth was on me again. 

Apparently, I’d been so busy glaring that I forgot what to do with a dick in my mouth. I rubbed my tongue along his glands and considered what Luke had said. A toy...ah, yeah. Sex toy. That made sense. I reached one hand around and gently prodded the base of it, right in the center. It wasn’t made of rubber but it felt close in texture. 

Luke whined around my cock.

Huh. I pressed it again, got another whine. Maybe this toy had a use, after all. I angled my head so that I was only sucking on the tip of Luke’s cock and rhythmically pressed on the flat base of the toy. 

L uke shuddered. He pulled off to pant, to moan. His cock was leaking more precum than I’d ever seen from him, coating my lips and tongue in it. Luke mouthed along the length of my cock. His legs shook. “Gods, Percy.” 

I teased Luke until he came, partially in my mouth and partially on my chin. Then I kept licking him.

Luke shuddered away from me. He turned, kissed me for one long and hard moment, then gave me the most enthusiastic blowjob I’d ever gotten from him. 

Later brought something new yet again. I didn’t realize that there was so much to sex until Luke began to teach me, to show me all of the intricacies of it. We were on Luke’s bed, because that was the best place to roll around without hurting something. The floors were unforgiving, even when you’d been sleeping on them for months. 

Luke had me on my stomach, legs apart and ass up. His dick slid between my ass cheeks, thrusting, in a mimicry of sex. The slide got easier as he went, until he was gliding with ease. The sounds our bodies made were obscene and if I hadn’t been so turned on, it would have been embarrassing. 

Okay, so it was still a little teeny tiny bit embarrassing. And it was still embarrassing to have him touch me there and to have his complete attention. It was easy to forget about that when it felt so good. Which was the point in giving up my autonomy. I _wanted_ Luke to make me feel so good that I forgot about everything else. This was the only way that I could handle being alive. 

Even though this made me nervous - I still couldn’t get much more than my fingertip inside of my hole - Luke didn’t try fucking me. He seemed more than happy to just slide his cock against my hole, although he made little moaning noises like it wasn’t enough. The size of Luke’s cock was less intimidating than it had been in the bath just a week earlier. The hot, velvety skin was so good against mine. The weight of it made my legs shake with nerves and pleasure. 

Luke stopped and drew away. 

I whined and canted my hips back. I’d thought that we were going to get off like that. I glanced back at him. “Luke?” 

Luke parted my cheeks and just looked at me. That was even more embarrassing. He reached between my legs and stroked my dick. 

It felt good. How could his hand feel so good every time? Why did I feel like this every time that he touched me? Was it always going to be this intense? I moaned. But I really wanted him to stop looking at me. Somehow being looked at was worse than the mock sex we were having. Maybe because it gave me time to cool down and think. “Luke?”

“Hang on,” he said and sounded distracted. He stroked two fingers across my hole.

My hips jerked. I couldn’t help it; it felt good. I didn’t know how to describe what I felt except that hot and wet seemed accurate. Aching, I thought, I was aching for it. But these days I was always aching somewhere, for something. 

Luke put his thumbs close to my hole and stretched me open. He did this with much more ease than I had ever been able to manage. Maybe I’d been wrong about how far we were going to go today. 

“Luke,” I whined. Hot and wet and aching. Wetness dripped down my balls. I wanted to be full of something, which was weird because it was usually the other way around. I buried my face into the pillow and whined again to let Luke know that I was unhappy. 

Luke pressed the pad of his finger against my hole. Not penetrating, just a little bit of pressure. A deep, growling noise came from his throat. 

My dick twitched at the sound of it, a glob of precum dripping onto the sheets. Before I could ask what he was doing - or going to do - I felt something against my hole. Not Luke’s finger. It was wet and slick and definitely not his dick either. The moan I let out was high and surprised. I tried to squirm away. 

Luke suddenly had a vice-like grip on my hips. His nails dug into my skin, scraping against my bones. He moved with that impossible speed for the first time in a while, manipulating himself into the position he wanted. Luke was still behind me but now my knees were on either side of his thighs. His ankles were crossed over my shoulders, keeping my head down and my back arched. He hadn’t let up with his nails and I knew that when he was done, I’d be bleeding. In the new position, I could feel Luke’s cock rub against mine. Then I felt that wet, slippery thing against my hole again and realized with shock that it was his _tongue._

I was stuck in position, couldn’t so much as pull away, though I did try. My mind went totally blank with pleasure and shock. Luke was licking my ass. His tongue prodded at my hole, his lips pressed against the sensitive skin. I whined and whined again and couldn’t stop whining because it felt so good. There was an ache deep inside of me, made worse by the sparks of pleasure at the rim of my hole. I clawed at the sheets because it was the only way I could move, couldn’t even grind my hips down to thrust against Luke’s dick. I was just dripping precum onto it. The heads of our cocks rubbed in a way that made me shake. “Luke, stop.”

Luke ignored me for a few moments in favor of licking and mouthing at me. When he pulled back, it was only to growl one word: “Why?” Then, without waiting for an answer, his tongue was against my hole again. He licked me like he was starving for me. 

Pleasure dripped down the backs of my thighs and curled up my back. My legs shook, the head of my cock kept maddeningly rubbing against the head of Luke’s. Tears built but didn’t fall yet. It felt so good. Luke always took me higher and higher. Words failed me, I couldn’t have thought of an answer even if I wanted to. Instead, I moaned. 

Luke took that to mean I wanted to continue. Again, he spread me open with his thumbs. He stiffened his tongue and pushed the tip _inside_ of me. 

I felt a bolt of pleasure. The tears did fall now. I tried to reach my cock, but couldn't because of how Luke’s legs were positioned. I trembled. 

Luke pushed a finger inside of me; only up to the second knuckle but in that moment, his finger felt huge. It felt weird and my brain said that it was wrong. 

I couldn’t help but flex around the intrusion. Humiliation burned through me hot and molten. Luke was inside of me and it made my face turn scarlet with embarrassment. This wasn’t how I wanted it to go; if it had to happen at all. I probably would have been less embarrassed if it felt bad. But it didn’t. Weird, yes, but not bad. We were one step closer to Luke fucking me, to Luke making me irreversibly _his_. I was rapidly running out of things for Luke to take from me. “Stop,” I whispered, voice barely a rasp. 

Either Luke didn’t hear me or he ignored me, because his next move was to lick my rim again. I was stretched around his finger and his tongue only added to the pleasure. Luke’s cock twitched against mine. He moaned while he licked me. Then he eased his finger out...and back in. 

I moaned at the sensations. My balls were getting higher, tighter; I was going to cum soon. I wanted him to go back to mock sex, to humping me until he came on the small of my back. Then he could wrap his lips around my cock and I could cum in his throat again. 

Instead, Luke eased his finger in and out of me. With the thumb of his free hand, he stretched me open again, this time to slide his tongue in with his finger. He slid his entire finger into me. 

The stretch almost burned. I was so wet that I barely noticed it. Sharp pleasure hit me like a train. I keened as the pleasure radiated from inside of me. 

Luke moaned again. He pressed the pad of his finger against the spot inside of me until I squirmed. Then he pulled his finger out entirely and there was only his tongue. I was open enough that Luke could push his tongue past my rim. 

My eyes rolled back into my skull. Tears streamed down my cheeks, joining the wet spot on the bed where I’d been drooling. My mind was sparks of white and I was so close, so close but it just wasn’t enough…

Luke squeezed a hand between our bodies. He stroked himself a few times. Luke lifted his face from my ass long enough to ask, “Do you wanna cum, Percy?” 

I made an unintelligible noise. Words were beyond me. I pushed my ass back. Gods, if he was going to do something this demeaning then I wanted to cum from it at least. 

Luke laughed, breath ghosting across my skin. Then he pressed his lips to my hole and pushed his tongue back into me. His hand slid up the length of his cock and curled around both of our heads. 

That was all it took. I came so hard I almost passed out. 

Every chance I got, I crawled back to my own bed. I didn’t want to share Luke’s bed with him more than I had to. We were living in a very large matchbox, but it was still a matchbox. Luke could leave when he wanted to, but the only thing in the world I had was this huge, stupid dog bed. 

Luke rarely bothered me when I was in my own bed. So if I wanted a break from sex and touching, that was where I went. I could curl up beneath my blanket and come down from the high of orgasm. It was like hitting the reset button. With Luke, I got too far away from myself. I was somewhere floating in space where nothing but pleasure could touch me.

My grief came back when Luke wasn’t touching me and I cried. I cried a lot. If they could see me, my friends and mom would be so disgusted and disappointed. I was sleeping with the enemy. I was a traitor to everyone I knew. They might have thought I was dead but I knew the truth and the truth was worse. 

I didn’t try to hide my crying. Luke must have noticed but he didn’t bring it up. The time between was _my_ time. 

Luke’s mouth on me was literally the best thing in the world. I thought his mouth on my dick was the greatest, but it turned out there was more for him to show me. I really, really liked it when his tongue was on my hole. Even if it made me feel incredibly dirty and gross. 

I wanted to return the favor, to try it out on him. It was gross in theory but if Luke could finger me while he did it, then maybe I could finger him. Fingering was one step closer to fucking. I still ached at the thought of being inside him. But I could never bring myself to ask “hey, can I literally lick your asshole?” 

So I waited until he was asleep. It was easier to face him, so to speak, when he was unconscious. I didn’t think he would care if I interrupted his sleep to get him off. Luke lay on his stomach tonight, which was perfect. Gods, I had no idea what I was doing and I was nervous. 

Luke was a clean guy. He bathed religiously, once before bed and once after getting up. He didn’t like being dirty. So I wasn’t worried about that part of it, not really. I was worried that I would somehow do it wrong or that he wouldn’t like it and get mad at me. What if he didn’t even want to be fucked by me? Luke always had that stupid toy in. Maybe he liked it better than a real cock. 

Still, hovering over him, I hesitated. I’d sucked his cock but this was very different. Well, I’d done scarier things than this. I should just get it over with. And I knew how he did it to me, so I should just do the same for him. I parted his cheeks and lowered my face. I swiped at his hole. He tasted like clean skin. 

Luke moaned, soft little things that gave me encouragement. I was sure he was still asleep and that it felt good. Luke couldn’t lie in his sleep: not that he ever lied to me. 

His moans encouraged me and I basically went to town. I liked this, I liked being the one to make his hips roll. It was easier than I thought it would be; I just listened to what made him moan the loudest, what made him push his ass into my face, and I did that again and again. The weird thing was that I was getting very, very hard from this. Yeah, it always turned me on when Luke licked me, but I was licking him now. 

“Percy,” Luke moaned and I realized that I’d woken him up. He reached around and grabbed my wrist. “C’mere.” Luke pulled my wrist so that I had to crawl up over his body. He planted my hand on the mattress beside his head. 

My cock was level with the globes of his ass. It was leaking precum onto his skin. I was so turned on, so fucking turned on that I was shaking. I lowered my hips to grind in the cleft between his cheeks. 

Luke moaned again, canted his hips towards me. He spread his legs further apart. “There we go, c’mon, sweetheart.” Luke sounded still mostly asleep for how turned on he was. 

He was already slick with my saliva but my precum just made the glide smooth and filthy. I trembled as I thrust, a mock of actual sex. Would he let me? I wondered. Would he let me mount him? I hadn’t even gotten around to fingering him. A desperate, needy moan slipped out of my throat. It sounded distressed even to my own ears. 

Luke reached around again, found my cock this time. He guided me towards his hole, rubbed the head against it a few times and then let go. “S’okay, Percy. Go ahead.” 

I trembled. My hands shook, my entire body shook. I wanted so bad. Luke was really going to let me. He was going to let me fuck him even before he got to fuck me. I positioned myself, thought about how careful Luke had been the first time he’d slid a finger into me, and tried to be careful too. My dick was a lot thicker than a single finger. 

Luke had more experience with me, even if it was just with a toy (and I’m not sure that was the only thing ever to be inside of him), and he put up no resistance. Usually he used lube but I made so much precum that neither of us reached for the bottle. He moaned and gripped the pillow. 

I got the head in and thought I was going to die. Luke’s body was hot, like literally hot. And he was tight for how easily he took me. It was better than his mouth. And it felt so damn good. I had a dizzying realization that I was no longer a virgin. 

Luke pushed his ass back to encourage me to sink deeper into him. 

I knew I wasn’t going to last long. But I didn’t think Luke would either. The noises he made were practically mewls of pleasure. He let me find my rhythm and then matched it, pushing back on my downward thrusts. Luke felt so good around my cock and I wondered if this was how he felt when he had the toy in and why he didn’t ask me to fuck him sooner. Honestly, I never wanted to pull my dick out of him. 

Obviously I had to or we’d get stuck. I came inside of him and Luke came on the sheets with me touching his dick at all. I pulled out with a moan and lay on top of him, worn out. 

His back was covered in a cold sweat that felt good against my heated skin and he breathed hard. But he didn’t shove me off him. Luke turned his face and I shifted to kiss him. Luke was soft and pliable beneath me. He had fallen mostly asleep again now that the fun was over. 

But I couldn’t sleep. Our dynamic had shifted, just a little, and now I had some power over him. I lay on top of Luke, kissing him and running my hands along his sides, until I was hard again. The second time I pushed into him, he was still wet and warm inside from my cum. For the first time in a long time, I felt firmly inside my own body. The second time wasn’t careful; I fucked Luke so hard that the bed moved with it. 

Luke was going to feel this later; I’d make sure of it. And when he left to get food or go to a meeting, everyone was going to smell me in him and know that someone had dominated Luke Castellan, general of the Titan Army. 

I wasn’t a virgin. I was inside of Luke. I wasn’t a virgin. A big part of me always thought that I would have sex with girls. Maybe even Annabeth, because it sort of felt like things were headed in the direction of a relationship. Relationships meant sex. 

Then again, maybe I had no clue what I was talking about. Luke and I weren’t in a relationship. I was his pet, a thing to do with what he wanted. If he asked me to his boyfriend, I would probably say yes. But I wasn’t special enough for that honor. 

“Like you’re made for me,” Luke murmured as he slipped two fingers inside of me. I was oozing wet with slick, so much so that it glistened on my thighs and was going to stain Luke’s nice slacks. He had no problems getting two fingers inside of me, which, from what I understood, was not common in males. In fact, we were both pretty certain that this was something I got from being a son of the sea god. 

Luke pushed his fingers deep, found the spot inside that made me arch my back with pleasure. He stroked me there, kept up a constant, pulsing pressure. 

The shame I felt for loving Luke’s fingers inside of me was a deep, visceral one. I’ve never been ashamed of anything more than when he was inside of me, ever. But that shame wasn’t strong enough to override my body’s instincts to roll my hips, thrusting back onto his fingers over and over again. It wasn’t strong enough to stop the spurts of slick from my ass or the precum from my cock. As I rode Luke’s fingers, the head of my cock caught against the soft fabric of his dress shirt and beneath that I could feel the hard planes of his abs. I tipped my head back, exposing my throat - I couldn’t care - closed my eyes and moaned. The moans tumbled out from my lips, one after another, punctuated by gasps of breath. 

The muscles in Luke’s arm flexed as he drove his fingers up to meet me on every downward thrust. He was visibly hard in his slacks, the front of them tented, but he didn’t pull himself out. Luke ignored how hard he was to focus on me, to gaze up at me with a rapturous expression. 

Every time we had sex, Luke would look at me like I was a marvel or a work of art or something equally embarrassing. It made me wonder if sex would have worked to get him on our side, back before it was too late. What if I had sucked him off or spread my legs for him? Would Luke have reconsidered? 

“Where did you go?” Luke whispered, an edge of concern in his tone. 

I leaned forward and kissed him, the soft brush of my lips against his, a stark contrast to how erratic my thrusts were becoming. “Thinking of lost time,” I said because it would please him and also happened to be the truth. 

Luke’s responding kiss was firm and hot, teeth scraping against my bottom lip as he pulled back. He didn’t promise that we would make up for lost time, couldn’t promise me that. “Gods, I -“ Luke cut himself off by sinking his teeth into the side of my neck. 

My hips stuttered, pleasure shot through my entire body. I closed my eyes and threw my head back, spine arching as I came all over his shirt. 

His fingers were still inside me, their pads pressed against the spot that made me see stars. Now it sent shocks of pleasure up my spine. Luke sucked a bruise into my neck, worried my skin with his teeth and tongue until he was satisfied. When he pulled off, his breath was closer to a pant. He eased his fingers out of me and they were soaked with a clear fluid. With his other hand, Luke finally pulled his cock free and then began jacking himself off with the hand still coated in my slick. 

I watched him through my lashes, still perched on his lap, reeling from my orgasm. How were they always so good? How did Luke always make my legs feel jello? I leaned forward and caught his mouth in a kiss, slid my tongue across his lips. 

Luke parted his lips for me, let my tongue into his mouth. He moaned as his hand worked faster, the sounds slick and obscene - but not so much as when his fingers had been inside of me - eager to orgasm now that I’d cum. When we were together, Luke always made sure I came first. 

I don’t know what I was doing. No, I _did_ know what I was doing. I just didn’t know _why._ I pressed up to Luke, crowded into his space, got in his way. 

With my tongue in his mouth, Luke couldn’t protest. I could feel the vibration from his question. He adjusted so that one hand was on my hip, the other pressed in tight to his side so that he could still get at his cock. 

I lowered my ass down and the head of his cock pressed into the meat of my ass. I couldn’t keep kissing him, I needed to breathe, needed to focus. 

“Percy,” Luke’s voice had a brittle edge to it. “What are you doing?” His grip on my hip tightened. 

I shook my head and adjusted how I was positioned. The head of his cock caught on the rim of my hole and I jerked my hips back instinctively. No, I told myself, that’s what I wanted. 

“Percy,” Luke said, voice cracking. His hand had slowed. 

The blunt head of Luke’s cock was girthier than his two fingers. I almost worried that it wouldn’t fit, that I _wasn’t_ made for him like he said. “I just,” I didn’t understand why I was panting again, “I just want to try something.” 

Luke didn’t stop me. He just waited to see what I was going to do, eyes never leaving my face. His hand had stilled, his hips no longer pushing up as he sought out friction. 

I took a deep breath, relaxed my body, and sank down. There was pressure and then the head slid inside me. It was a stretch but it didn’t burn; I was plenty wet for this. I was definitely panting again, breath coming in fast. Oh gods I was doing this. But would he let me just, just do this? I didn’t want to take all of him, not right now, I wanted just this much. Blood rushed to fill my cock again as my body took an interest in what was happening. I sat up enough that I could look Luke in the face. 

Luke had stopped moving and now he sat in stunned stillness. I could see his pulse fluttering in the hollow of his throat. His eyes were downcast, as though he was hoping to see where our bodies connected. 

I was nervous all of a sudden, wondering if this would push him too far, too fast for me. I tipped his chin up so that Luke was looking me in the eye. “I-I just want…” gods, I’d started this and got this far, now I had to say it out loud. “I just want you t-to..” I forced myself to maintain eye contact even though I felt like hiding from humiliation. “I want you to cum in me,” I said in a rush so that it sounded like all one word. 

Luke’s eyes widened. He swallowed and then nodded. Luke held me tight to his chest with both arms wrapped around me. He didn’t let me move so much as an inch. His hips thrust up, cock pushing into me oh so carefully. Not too deep, not much deeper than the head. Luke got in up to his shaft and then pulled out until he was only barely touching me and slid back in. It was careful but I could feel Luke shaking, feel his heart pounding against mine, feel the tension in his body. Luke was holding back. 

Part of me wanted to tell Luke to go to town. Just fuck me good and deep. He would do it, if I asked him to. But I wanted to enjoy this; enjoy the little bit of power I had over Luke, enjoy his suffering as he struggled to hold himself back. I managed to get one arm between us. I bypassed my erection and balls, and slid my fingers along my taint. My fingers grazed my stretched rim and I shivered delightfully as the nerves sparked. 

Luke moaned, face buried against my neck, sounding like he was being tortured. He stopped moving for a moment, took a few shaky breaths, and then started up again. 

With my fingertips, I felt his firm cock slide in and out of me. He was wet and sticky with a mixture of my slick and his precum. His cock slid through my fingers, into my body, and now I was touching the shaft. “Oh,” I whispered. I nuzzled the side of Luke’s head, breathed in the smell of him. “Luke,” my voice was still a whisper. “Can you cum in me like this? Or do you need…?” And I awkwardly curled my fingers around the hot shaft of his cock. The angle was all wrong but I wasn’t sure how much that mattered in this case. 

“Gods. Fuck,” Luke said. “You’re perfect, baby.” He kept up that same awful-slow, not-deep-enough pace and absolutely crushed me to his chest. His cock slid in and out with calculated precision, never going deeper than the tip. Luke panted against my neck, scraped his teeth against my skin. 

I wasn’t sure how I felt about being called baby. Was I supposed to call Luke daddy now? That felt weird but also sort of exciting, if the feelings it sparked were anything to go off. I stayed absolutely still except for my fingers, loosely curled around Luke’s shaft, wrist moving and aching as I tried to keep some sort of rhythm. 

Luke came a few moments later, cock inside me just enough to fulfill my desire. I felt the hot pulse as he came, coating my insides with his seed and scent. Luke kissed me softly after he came. He brought one hand up to stroke my cock. 

“Luke, please,” I begged and hated both of us for it. My cock was aching again, leaking again, smearing streaks of precum all over Luke’s shirt. “Let me cum again.” I didn’t want to use my own hands because when Luke touched me, he took me higher than I could get on my own. 

Luke pulled me up by my ass so that my dick was level with his face. He got one long lick in and that was the end for me. Again. 

I came on Luke’s face, most of it going into his open mouth. 

Luke swallowed what was in his mouth. 

I sat back and licked the rest of my cum off Luke’s face. I still wasn’t too sure about the taste but it made Luke happy. 

Luke kissed me gently. “I’m so lucky to have you,” he murmured.


	10. Dropped

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy is a mess.

Silent screams built within my chest, swelling until I thought my lungs would burst with them. I wanted to scream. I couldn’t scream. The monsters would come. Let them. No. Too painful. Was this any less painful? What do I have left in life except for this room and Luke? 

I gripped my chest as pain shot through it. _Maybe you’re having a heart attack._ It’s just heartbreak. No one ever died from that. Old men do sometimes when their wives die before them. But Luke would never let me die. Would he? I didn’t think so. He wasn’t physically abusive - _he tied you up and raped you - you consented to the sex - you keep instigating it too_ \- and he’d already shown he wouldn’t let me starve myself. 

I stopped, looked at the rug beneath my feet. A bone chilling thought occurred to me for the first time: what if I did succeed...but Luke just turned back time for me?

Hot, angry tears slid down my cheeks. It wasn’t fair. 

It was quiet enough that even across the room, I heard the lock click open. That was all the warning I got for when Luke returned and it was a new thing he was doing. He used to just teleport right into the room. 

Furiously, I wiped my face dry with the fabric of my chiton. Then I crossed the room, almost running for the door.

Luke barely managed to get the door shut before I was on him. I crashed into him and my mouth was on his, swallowing his groan of pain as the back of his head hit the wooden door. I kissed him like I’d die if his lips weren’t on mine. 

Buttons used to give me problems but now I could pop the one on Luke’s cameo pants with ease. Five seconds after Luke walked in the door, my hand was down his pants, stroking his cock to full hardness. 

Luke moaned in my mouth. He parted his lips, let my tongue slide between them. His hands came to my waist, bunching the green fabric of the chiton up and tying it off in the back so that it would be out of the way. 

With my free hand, I pushed Luke’s pants down to his thighs. It involved leaving a lot of red welts on Luke’s skin as I dragged my nails down. I didn’t stop stroking his cock, moving my hand just the way that Luke liked. 

I pushed at Luke until he turned around, facing the door. My entire body shook as I pressed against Luke’s back. Sometime, I’d gotten a little taller. Not much. Still wasn’t as tall as Luke, so to make him spread his legs, a quick kick to both his ankles was necessary. 

Luke was always kind to me, working me open, being gentle, never forcing more on me more than what I asked for. 

I didn’t extend the same courtesy to Luke. He was evil and I was trapped and this was the only thing he would give me that I asked for. Lube was unnecessary; I made more than enough precum. Between my cock and the toy that Luke liked, he didn’t even really need to be prepped because he almost always had something inside of him. 

Luke’s body around my cock was warm and welcoming and felt softer than anything I’d never touched. For a few moments, I just basked in how good he felt around me. Then, as if seized by some kind of demon, I sank my teeth into Luke’s shoulder blade.

Luke moaned when I entered him. He never fought me on this, never tried to curb my appetites or make me wait. He was always ready for me. Luke was relaxed until I bit him; then every muscle tensed. 

I pulled out and then slammed back into him so hard the door rattled. Yes. Over and over again, I thrust into Luke, picking up the pace as I went. One hand wrapped around the base of his cock and the other sinking my nails into his hip bone. It didn’t matter; small wounds healed almost instantly. 

Luke’s moans were short and sounded like I was forcing them out of his lungs. He pressed his hands to the door and bowed his head. Not a peep about how I’d drawn blood with my teeth or how my grip on him kept tightening. He let me do whatever I wanted to him. 

And that pissed me off even more. By the time I came inside of Luke, I was so pissed off that I was seeing red instead of white. My chest heaved as I tried to catch my breath. I pulled out and spun Luke around again, pushing him back against the door. 

Luke hadn’t cum yet. He always waited for me, which was so goddamn annoying. 

I dropped to my knees and took as much of his cock as I could fit into my mouth. If I made eye contact with him, Luke would see how angry I was, so I just growled around his cock and glared at the skin in front of me. He was big enough to make my jaw ache and long enough that if I took him to the root, the head of his cock scraped against the back of my throat. It hurt. A single tear slid down my cheek. 

Luke didn’t look at me either. His head was tipped back, eyes closed. His legs trembled. All I could smell was my own cum as it dripped out of him and slid down his thigh. He rested his hands on my head; didn’t pull my hair or manipulate what I was doing at all. 

I almost wished he would. I wanted to choke on his dick and die because that was what we both deserved. Rage made me tremble. It took all my willpower not to bite down. Lately I’d been grinding my teeth so much that they ached...at least until my next bath. Gotta love how nothing I do to myself is permanent. 

Luke came down my throat without warning. He didn’t make a sound. He slowly pulled out and slid down so that our faces were level. Luke kissed the corner of my mouth. He didn’t say anything aloud but his eyes asked ‘do you feel better now?’

I dropped my gaze to the floor between us. It was easier to look at. 

“Let’s take a bath,” Luke said gently. For all that he’d let me manhandle him, it was just that: Luke was _letting_ me. He picked me up, tossing me over his shoulder. 

I gave a weak growl to let him know I was annoyed. 

Luke ignored me, of course. He set me on the bench seat and knelt in front of me, smoothing his hands up my thighs. “Do you want to bathe together?” 

I shrugged. I was still angry but that short burst of energy was, well, short-lived. Partially because being angry all the time was exhausting but a big part of it had to do with how I was eating as little as Luke would let me get away with. Bathing would help. 

Luke ran the water for the sunken tub. When we bathed together, it was always in that one. My cum still ran down his leg. He didn’t seem to mind...then again, he was more than ready to get in the bath. When the bath was ready, Luke picked me up again and stepped down into the tub with me. 

I wanted to bathe in saltwater suddenly. I wanted to be away from Luke. Yet the thought of spending more time alone was nauseating. 

Luke set me on the stone bench beside him and used a pitcher to pour water over my head, wetting my hair. Sometimes I was stubborn and wouldn’t allow myself to get wet; today I didn’t care. Luke’s sigh of relief was warm against my skin. When my hair was wet, Luke poured shampoo onto it and massaged it into my scalp. While he let that set for a few minutes, Luke took the opportunity to wash his hair. He was faster with himself than with me. 

As Luke ducked his head beneath the water, I thought about drowning him. But I would be trapped alone in the palace without Luke’s protection. So Luke rose from the water and rinsed the shampoo out of my hair, none the wiser. 

He hummed, broken little notes to a song I didn’t know. Luke was gentle with me, somehow less seductive when he touched me now that we were having sex regularly. Did he change his mind? Did he not want me anymore but he’d made a monster out of me and now he had to deal with the consequences? Luke kissed the back of my neck. 

His touch felt like nothing. 

I curled up against Luke’s back. That was where he wanted me and I couldn’t stand to be alone again. Spooning had the added bonus of being able to rock into Luke whenever I wanted. Ten minutes after we laid down, I guided myself into him. 

Luke moaned, spreading his legs to give me better access. He always took me like he was made for me. Sometimes I thought he was. Maybe we were made for each other. Luke seemed to think so. He said so often enough. 

I pressed my lips against Luke’s shoulder blades while I fucked him. Not kissing; just tasting the warm salt of his skin. I wanted to taste the hot copper of his blood, feel it flow into my mouth and fill my belly with his life. 

Luke placed his hand over mine on his waist. He laced our fingers together. A quiet moan and then Luke said my name, “Percy…” 

I got goosebumps, suddenly inexplicably cold, and pulled the blanket over our heads. It was almost instant humidity beneath the blanket. All I could hear was the slick sound of my cock sliding in and out of Luke, and our simultaneous panting. The dark, enclosed space made by the blanket lended an air of intimacy to the affair. I thought about sinking my teeth into his flesh again - remake wounds that had already healed over - but I was too tired. Even though it would give him the wrong idea, I mouthed at his skin. 

Luke moaned my name again. 

The rocking chair showed up between one sleep and the next. Luke didn’t look surprised by its sudden appearance. It was made of wood but there was a cushion for the seat and back. After our bath, he pulled me over to it and sat down. 

Luke had lost something. I didn’t know what it was, and I hadn’t realized the extent until I saw him regain it. He pulled me onto his lap so that my back was to his chest. Luke’s skin was hot and his cock went from soft to hard almost immediately. 

I felt it grow against the small of my back. My body responded, cock swelling and wetness dripping down my thighs. 

“I want you,” Luke murmured. He lifted me by the hips and lined us up. Then he started rocking in the chair. The head of his cock pushed against my entrance and then away as we rocked back and forth. 

I understood with utter certainty _why_ we had now had a rocking chair, even if I wasn’t sure _how_ it had gotten there. Luke always enjoyed fingering me and licking me open. Since that time I’d let him push the head of his cock inside of me to fill me with his cum, Luke had done that several times too. Not once had he tried to go farther. I knew with complete certainty that that was going to change. And the pressure felt good, the rub of Luke’s cock head against my hole. 

Luke eased me down, the head of his cock pushing past the ring of muscle and into my body. He continued rocking, easing his cock into me a little deeper and a little deeper with every forward and back motion of the chair. His grip on my hips were firm enough to tell me not to try anything. As if I ever did these days. Slowly, Luke filled me until I felt the firm heat of his cock far deeper than ever before, and I was seated fully on Luke’s lap. 

I lay back against Luke, eyes closed. It would be better if we had a blanket because as warm as Luke was, my front was cold. Regardless, this was good. And so different from how ruthlessly I fucked Luke. Every movement made Luke’s cock rub against a sweet spot inside of me, made me see stars behind my eyelids. My moans were small and throaty. 

Luke placed delicate kisses against my neck as he rocked the chair and rocked into me. He felt incredible, better than I had dared hope. His big hands meandered up and down my torso, pinching my nipples and tickling my ribs, caressing my sternum, tracing my collarbones. When his hands finally dropped below my waist, one squeezed my thigh and the other circled the wet head of my cock. 

It felt so good I could cry. This was good and I hated Luke for making it good. Hating him was harder when he was so gentle with me like this. Part of me wished that Luke would violently rape me instead of this sweet seduction. I spread my legs a little wider, inviting him into the heat between them. 

Luke took the hint. The hand on my thigh moved to palm my balls, roll them gently in his hand. “Are you cold?” Luke asked when he noticed my shivering. 

“I’m always cold,” I managed. I opened my eyes to slits to watch Luke’s hands touching me. Sometimes I couldn’t stand to see it, sometimes it felt like I would die if I didn’t. Pleasure shot through me like a rocket. Between Luke’s cock in me and his hands on me, I was going to cum soon. As I watched, I noticed something odd. My abdomen bulged just the slightest bit. Bulge, no bulge, bulge… I pressed my palm over the spot. It was firm and the pressure changed from the inside. 

Luke moaned. The hand playing with my balls had gone back to my thigh. 

“Luke,” I said, taking the hand on my thigh and dragging it up. “Can you feel this?” I pressed his palm against the bulge. 

Another moan. Luke looked over my shoulder. “Is that -“

“Your cock?” I finished for him. “Yeah.” I ran my hand up and down the length of it, only stopping when I reached the base of my own cock. 

Luke came with a whimper. While he was still inside of me, he worked me with his hand to drive me to the edge. The rocking chair didn’t stop rocking until I’d cum. 

It didn’t come as a surprise that Luke wanted to fuck me as much as I wanted to fuck him. Well, that specific wording might give you some sort of impression that Luke had sex with me the same way I had sex with him. Luke was always gentle. 

“Harder, Luke,” I begged. 

“No,” Luke said. He kept up the steady pace, letting my orgasm build slowly. His hands around my wrists kept my arms above my head and his weight pinned me down so that I couldn’t try to turn it on him and make him fuck me hard. Luke never fucked me hard, never slid into me with the same reckless abandon I did to him. 

It made me cry. I trembled and pressed my face into the mattress until I couldn’t breathe and instinct made me turn my head. “Please, just a little harder.” 

“No.” Luke insisted. He kissed my shoulders, lips brushing sweetly against my bones. His cock rocked into me and brought only more of that sweet pleasure. 

I snarled at him. I didn’t want kindness and a mockery of love. I wanted pain, I wanted him to make me feel as lousy physically as I did emotionally. 

Luke’s expression had been curiously blank lately. He didn’t react to my snarling, except to lift his lips from my skin. “Don’t be like that, Percy. Just ask me to stop.” 

I wouldn’t. “Harder!” I spat. Rage built in me like a wave. Who knew you could be so angry and horny at the same time? I saw red and tasted copper in my mouth. 

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Luke said mildly. He was cool and so detached from my rage that I wondered if he felt anything at all. Maybe he loved me, once. Almost. I made it hard to love me. 

I snarled again, trying to twist out of his grasp. If he wasn’t going to give me what I wanted, then there wasn’t a point to this. “Let me go!” 

“No.”

Perhaps that wasn’t my best choice of phrase. Luke heard the words and always responded with no. Like a dog that had been trained. Because whenever I said it, I meant for him to release me as his prisoner. 

“Get out of me!” I spat. I clawed at Luke’s hands as best I could but if he noticed, he didn’t even flinch. “I don’t want you! I don’t want you!” Thrashing was next to useless but I did it anyway. 

Luke didn’t skip meals. Luke trained when he left this room. He wasn’t weak like me. Either way, Luke didn’t get out of me and he ignored my lies. Maybe he knew they were lies….I wasn’t sure if he did or if he was just that much of a dick. 

I screamed in frustration. 

Luke ducked his head and caught my mouth in a hard kiss. The angle made his cock push a little harder into me. He was grinding now, so that he could keep his lips on mine. 

The grinding had the dual effect of rubbing my cock against the sheets. My orgasm came and the moan that I made was swallowed by Luke. As I was pulsing around Luke’s cock, I felt him twitch and then a burst of warmth. 

When it was over and I lay exhausted with Luke’s cum oozing out of me, Luke asked quietly, “Do you want to go back to your bed?” His arms were around me, holding me sweetly. He was always too sweet, too kind. I wished we could fuck like enemies rather than like lovers. 

I could barely keep my eyes open but I managed to shake my head. Luke would take me if I said yes. He’d done it before, even though I could see on his face that he didn’t like sleeping without me. 

The days blurred together. Telling the difference between being awake and being asleep was getting harder and harder. Luke was in my dreams and I couldn’t escape this room even when I was asleep. Every single day was more of the same. 

Until it wasn’t. 

Luke’s cock was buried deep inside of me, the firm heat of it stretching me open. I felt his every harsh exhale on my chest. His blue eyes were unfocused, probably a million miles away from me. Just going through the motions. 

I never thought that we would get bored of sex. At least not this soon. Then again, we’d twisted into every position we could, put our mouths and hands everywhere on each other's bodies. What would happen to me when Luke got bored of me? I touched his cheek with my fingertips, drawing his attention back to me. 

The look in Luke’s blue eyes when he met my gaze was broken, fractured. He looked like a shadow of a person. His curly blond hair was getting long enough to hang in his eyes again. Luke ducked his head to kiss me, a quick peck on the lips, before straightening up again. Some of the warmth was back in his eyes. 

As I crested the edge of orgasm, Luke slowed time down for me. It felt like watching a timelapse of a flower opening or a slowed down explosion. Intense pleasure curled slowly through my body, moving from my dick and spiraling out to my toes and the top of my head. Orgasms usually only lasted a couple of seconds, just an intense burst of pleasure that faded quickly. This lasted for full minutes. And it was breaking me. 

I arched my back off the bed, dug my heels into the mattress with all the speed of molasses. Tears built and rolled slow tracks down my cheeks and into my ears. It took so long. It felt so good that it hurt. Humans - and demigods - weren’t built for extreme pain; we also weren’t built for extreme pleasure. 

Luke didn’t release his grip on my time until every last drop of cum had been wrung out of me and lay in white pools on my stomach. 

When he did pull me back into normal time, it was like a rubber band snapping. I made a noise, something like a scream, probably, but I couldn’t hear myself. As soon as I was free, I pulled off of Luke’s cock and scrambled away from him, to the far end of the bed. My whole body shook, my heart pounded so hard I thought it was going to give out. “Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me!” 

“Sorry,” Luke’s mouth made the shape. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” He narrowed the distance between us but didn’t touch me. His eyes were wide, all traces of arousal gone. 

I wanted to rip off my own skin. There was too much feeling. My whole body was ultra sensitive. Even the air conditioning on my skin felt like too much. I put my head between my knees and dug my fingers into the hair at the back of my head. It was too much. I wanted to die. Gods, I just wanted to die. 

I was aware of Luke hovering nearby, worried and apologizing. He was talking but I couldn’t understand a word of it. It was like he was speaking a foreign language. Luke’s entire body leaned towards me like he was dying to touch me. If he wanted to, he could have. It’s not like anyone would come to my rescue if I screamed. It’s not like I could have fought him off. 

Eventually, I let myself fall onto my side. I was still curled in a tight ball. I didn’t like how my skin felt stretching over my spine or how my knees pressed into my temples but I couldn’t uncurl. 

My skin prickled where Luke’s hand hovered over my shoulder, still not touching me. I groaned. The prickling sensation went away as Luke withdrew his hand. The tears didn’t stop. 

It was a long time before Luke tried again. He rested a hand on my shoulder, warm and calloused. 

My muscles twitched beneath his palm. I was drooling against the mattress and staring into middle space. Suddenly I was so tired. All I wanted was to die and if I couldn’t have death; I would take its sister, sleep. 

I was tucked in the far corner of the bed but Luke still managed to curl himself around me and pull a blanket over both of us. He stroked my arm, my side, my leg, and kissed my hair. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I won’t do that again, okay?” Luke whispered it over and over again, mixing in some praise over my performance. 

I didn’t answer. 

There was no avoiding Luke but as soon as I could walk again, I went back to my dog bed on the floor. I curled up beneath the sheet and shivered. It was much colder without Luke and his comforter. There was still cum on me and in me but I didn’t care enough to wash it off. I squeezed my eyes shut and fell into an uneasy sleep. 

Luke would never be denied for long. I knew that with utter conviction. I was on my back, though I’d fallen asleep on my side. He was between my legs again, hands keeping my thighs apart so that I didn’t crush his head between them. Luke’s tongue lapped at my hole. 

Every touch of his tongue, every hot exhale of breath, made the nerves in my legs twitch with pleasure-pain. I tried to shove his head away. 

Luke wasn’t deterred in the slightest. 

The first sob broke. The tears came on so quickly that I hadn’t even expected them. One moment I was asleep, the next I was sobbing. 

“Do you want me to leave?” Luke asked against the sensitive skin of my thigh. “I’ll go. I’ll sleep somewhere else.” It was a thinly veiled threat. Luke’s room was only safe if Luke was in it. And I couldn’t stand the thought of being here alone. I would rather have Luke and this than be alone. 

“No,” I snarled. I clawed at Luke’s back, raked my nails deep into his skin. Hard enough that I could feel his skin tearing. Yet even as I hurt him, I spread my legs open a little wider, rolled my hips into his. 

Luke kissed me. He tasted like the cum he’d been eating out of me. His arms came around me and he held me close, kissing me and rocking against me. 

My senses filled with Luke. There was nothing except him and his body and wasn’t this what I wanted? If I couldn’t leave, then I wanted to be out of my head. 

“I’m sorry, Percy,” Luke whispered. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

I looked at him incredulously. All he _did_ was hurt me. 

“How can I make it better?” 

“Let me go.”

“Anything but that,” Luke begged. He sounded scared, really genuinely scared. Why would he be scared? He wasn’t the one being held prisoner. “I’ll do anything except that.” Luke kissed me hard, desperation making him shake. When he pulled back, he dropped his face against my collarbone. But not before I saw the tears rolling down his cheeks. 

“Then kill me.” 

Luke shook his head. “I can’t. Baby, I can’t.” 

I wrapped my arms around Luke’s neck, my legs around his waist. I crushed him against me. I ate every day but never very much. I’d lost a lot of my muscle mass. All that was left were curves hollowed out of me, bones protruding grotesquely. Luke’s weight pushed the air from my lungs and made me feel as substantial as a piece of paper. 

After weeks of doing this, we were both trained. Fall into each other’s arms and get turned on. It was easy to rub up against him. 

The head of Luke’s cock pressed against my hole. I didn’t want him inside of me; I was too sensitive, too sore for that. Regardless, I pushed against him, encouraging Luke to push his cock into me. 

Luke did what he thought I wanted. This was the only thing he was willing to give me. Not my freedom. When he was fully inside of me, Luke stilled and kissed my neck. “I love you,” Luke whispered. His voice was broken. “I love you, Percy. Why can’t that be enough?” 

Gods, my heart shattered with those words. This was so wrong. I wanted him to tear my throat out with his teeth. How could he claim to love me? “Why won’t you let me go? Can’t you do this with any demigod...or monster?” I asked. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand why it had to be me. If you loved someone, this wasn’t how you treated them. 

Luke cried into my shoulder. He hugged me hard. His cock was still inside of me but he didn’t move. When he finally caught his breath, he said, “You’ll be free soon, Percy. But in the meantime, I don’t want to be alone.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. My heart skipped a beat. It was painful and the pain in my chest only got worse as I processed what he said. “Where are you going?” I tried to sit up but Luke had a tight grip on me. I clawed at him, trying to get him to let me go this time, so that I could see his face. 

Luke trembled. He wouldn’t lift his head from my shoulder. “I’m going to die.” 

I couldn’t breathe. 

I’d spent months in this room with Luke and now he was telling me that...that he was going to die?! Even though I’d thought about killing Luke before, now that I was faced with his death, I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want it to happen. “What are you talking about?”

Luke took a wet, uneven breath. “Kronos is planning on killing me as soon as he can get his hands on Nico.” 

My arms gave out. I fell back onto the dog bed. Kronos was hunting down Nico? He was going to kill Luke once he got Nico? But why? It didn’t make sense. Thinking about it made my head hurt but worse than that, it only made me feel even more helpless than before. What could I do to stop this? 

Luke wiped his tears away with his wrists. He kept one eye on me the whole time. “Percy, can we please get along? Just for a few more months? Please.” 

“Why did you choose me?” I asked quietly, not meeting his eyes.

Luke pressed his lips to mine in a quick kiss. “Hasn’t it always been you and me?” He asked earnestly. 

And really, what could I say to that?


	11. Deceived

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Percy tries to be less hostile. Luke is approaching his breaking point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A short chapter this time. I'm basically headbutting a wall here with how much I can have them do after being locked in a room for so many months. Next chapter will have a change of scenery. We've also got an actual end chapter count now! Only three chapters and then the story is over.

Getting along with Luke turned out to be more difficult than I think either of us realized it would be. There were a lot of reasons why. 

We had fallen out of talking to each other after we started having sex. Maybe Luke tried to but in the early days, my head was so fogged with lust that I could barely think, and later on I was more interested in fucking him than in talking. After over a month of not talking to Luke, it seemed that I forgot how to and Luke didn’t know how to talk to me anymore either. There were too many topics that were liable to lead to fighting. Verbal fighting wasn’t the kind of fighting that we were interested in. 

I had made a habit of fucking Luke the moment that he walked through the door and every chance that we got. I was trying to tame my rutting, to be gentle the way Luke was with me. But I had made an animal of myself and my passions weren’t so easily tamed. Luke still looked at me with those sad, dejected blue eyes of his and didn’t make a sound as I hurt him over and over. 

When he came to me, forced my legs apart to accommodate himself between them, I couldn’t help but want more and spit with rage when I didn’t get it. I saw in his eyes that this hurt Luke as much as my cruel lust hurt him. 

And I still ended up in tears more often than not. 

After dinner, Luke brought out a bottle of wine. He rejoined me at the sitting area. “Do you want some?” he asked, a hard edge to his voice. The hard edge was there all the time now, a tension that Luke couldn’t seem to get rid of when he spoke to me. I suspected it was because he was angry at both of us. 

I was surprised that he was asking me instead of forcing me to drink it. Last time I drank wine, I didn’t like it. But I knew a peace offering when I saw one and so I nodded. 

Luke opened the bottle. I expected him to get glasses but he took a swig straight from the bottle. Then he handed it to me. After I took the bottle, Luke sank to the floor, resting his back against my arm chair. 

We passed the bottle between us. I took deep swigs even though it tasted foul and made my throat burn. I didn’t pay attention to how much Luke drank. 

It turned out that I am much more agreeable after drinking a bottle of wine. By the time the bottle was empty, I was on the floor beside Luke with my head against his shoulder. “I feel like Nemo,” I said and giggled. 

“Captain Nemo?” Luke asked. He held my hand, stroking the soft skin between my thumb and pointer fingers. 

“Who? No. Nemo the clownfish. You know, from the movie Finding Nemo.” I laughed again. Luke was silly. I told him so. 

Luke laughed too. He was not anywhere near as drunk as me. He’d been taking small sips. “Oh of course. My mistake.” 

“Stuck in a fish tank because I was stupid.” I could barely remember the Labyrinth or why it had seemed like a good idea to go into it chasing after Luke. “Can he see me?” 

“Who?”

“Your master.” The lesson of not using names finally seems to have sunk in. I didn’t want to say Kronos. 

“Oh.” This was of a far different tone than his prior _oh._ Luke squeezed my hand. “No. He doesn’t know you’re alive. He can’t see you.” 

“How did you manage to swing that one?” I asked, impressed despite myself. 

“Magic,” Luke answered without hesitation. Magic seemed to be Luke’s answer to everything. I didn’t know how he used it or where he got it. Demigods weren’t magic for all that we appeared to be. “I don’t want you to be unhappy.” 

“What made you think this was a good idea?” I asked, skirting answering that pretty neatly if I did say so myself. 

“I never thought they would catch _you,_ ” Luke admitted quietly. “I told them to. Put out the request. Not just for you, for all the demigods. It’s hard to...have an army that cannibalizes itself. But demigods are where the real power’s at. Even my master needs our allegiance to rise and we’re just his grandkids.” 

I made a face at being reminded that I was related by blood to Kronos. “Some grandpa,” I muttered. It stung a little that Luke hadn’t wanted me yet I was also proud that he thought they wouldn’t ever catch me. It was a strange mix of feelings. 

“Then I get a call from Geryon telling me that he caught some good demigods. High quality, worth a lot of gold.” Luke rubbed his cheek against my hair. “I never in a million years expected to see you pinned to the floor.” He squeezed his free hand into a fist. 

“It hurt,” I remembered. “I thought I was going to die.” 

Luke growled softly. “I did too.” 

“Was that when you decided to keep me?” 

“What? When you were pinned to the floor? No.” Luke sighed. He went silent for a while. “I take care of anyone who gets hurt. We don’t really have a doctor. You either die or don’t.”

“That’s usually how it goes,” I muttered. I thought of how casually the hurt demigod boy had burst into Luke’s room and it occurred to me for the first time that I was taking sanctuary from other people.

Luke went on like I hadn’t spoken. “So I brought you to my room. I healed a lot of demigods here. It’s the only safe place to bleed.” That made sense from what I’d seen. “But I told everyone to fuck off after you got here. It isn’t just monsters that want to kill you. A lot of demigods are pissed that you took the Olympian’s side.”

It was depressing to hear that other demigods wanted me dead. What exactly did they expect from me? Why did they think I would defect? “I don’t really remember coming in.” 

Luke snorted. “You wouldn’t. You were in a bad way. I thought you were dead when I got you here. It was only going to be until you were well enough to throw in the dungeon with everyone else.” Luke gave a long sigh. “But having you here, keeping me awake, reminding me. I thought. Maybe just for a while. Maybe it could be like at Camp. Before your Quest.”

I thought of that week as the golden days. My one blissful week at Camp where I’d finally found someone who liked me. Hot tears rolled down my flushed cheeks and I clenched my right hand. I momentarily forgot that Luke was holding that hand. “Don’t you think you burned that bridge?” 

Luke sighed again. “I was hoping not but...it seems I did.” 

I shoved my right palm in his face, showing him the asterisk scar in the center. “You did this to me!” I spat but it lacked the usual fire. 

Luke blinked, leaning his head back. He took my hand in both of his and stared at the scar. Then he pressed his lips to it. “I’m sorry.”

“That isn’t good enough.” 

Luke nodded. He didn’t try to argue. 

“You aren’t good enough,” I hissed. 

Luke didn’t reply. He kissed my wrist. But that’s all he did. 

It was disappointing and the disappointment pissed me off. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to actually do something about my anger. What was there to do? Besides, if I started to fight him, it might make him think that he could start hitting me. Luke wasn’t hurting me but I knew that he could if he wanted to. I knew what it felt like to be hit so hard you passed out and I wasn’t keen on introducing that element into our tumultuous relationship. 

Sometimes the knowledge slipped from my mind. A lot of things slipped from my mind so that wasn’t surprising. It was when it returned that I broke. 

Luke was going to die soon.

Even though I didn’t want this to be my life, even though I craved death every single second of every single day, I couldn’t imagine anything else. A life without Luke? Without sex? Impossible. How could he do this to me? Hadn’t Luke taken enough? Now I was going to be denied even him. 

He was my whole world. 

What was I going to do? What was going to happen to me? 

I sat next to Luke in the sunken tub. The water was warm enough that steam rose from it. Luke’s skin was pink with the heat. I leaned against him. “Don’t leave me,” I begged. My tears added drops of salt to the freshwater. 

“It isn’t up to me,” Luke said. He rested his cheek against the top of my head. 

“I’ll die with you.” I really would. I was half the boy I’d been before, weight dropping off me and muscles eaten away by a starving body. I didn’t even practice with the water anymore. What was the point? 

Luke made a noise like a wounded animal; pure pain. “Don’t say that. You have your whole life ahead of you.” 

My hands shook as I lifted them out of the water and curled my fingers around the stem of a wine glass. The glass wouldn’t break; I’d already tried. It was filled with a white wine because I liked white better than red. I drank because it cooled the anger within. The only way we could get through a conversation without hate fucking and fighting was if I was two glasses in. The wine sloshed uncomfortably in my empty stomach. 

I wanted to slip down beneath the surface of the water and never come back up. Instead, I pressed my face against Luke’s neck. 

Luke never drank as much as I did because he had other things to do, like maintaining the image that the general of Kronos’ army wasn’t completely falling apart behind closed doors. But now he lay eagle spread on the rug by the fireplace, bottle of white wine in his hand. It was mostly empty. We’d been sharing it. Luke’s face turned red when he’s drunk. His scar was a white line down his face, like silver in the moonlight. When Luke looked at me with those blue eyes full of pain, it made my heart hurt. “Hey, Percy, what if...what if you kissed me every time you want to kill yourself?”

Luke wasn’t the only drunk one here. I was so drunk that the whole room was spinning. Earlier Luke had managed to coax some crackers into me, so I probably wouldn’t throw up. But ask me to stand up? No way that would happen. Just rolling over was a massive effort. “What good would that do?” 

Luke stared at the ceiling. “Positive association?” 

“I would never stop kissing you,” I said. 

A tear rolled down Luke’s face. He didn’t answer. 

“So, is being on the Titan’s side everything you thought it would be?” I asked. I stared at the stained glass windows. There was nothing else to look at except for dark marble and I desperately wanted some color in my life. If I ever saw black marble or green lighting again, I would kill myself on the spot. 

Luke heaved a huge sigh. “You know, when my master began talking to me in my dreams, it wasn’t like _let’s overthrow the gods._ He didn’t get to that until more than a year after he first started talking to me. Looking at it in hindsight, I can see how he manipulated me. Needling at every little thing that went wrong, pointing it all out, fanning my anger, telling me what I wanted to hear.” 

Listening to Luke, it occurred to me for the first time in a long time that Luke had been manipulated by Kronos. He was brainwashed. Funny how I’d known that when I was a kid but now that I was older, I’d somehow forgotten that detail. 

“And if I wanted things to change, then I needed someone on my side who could _make_ the Olympians submit to my demands. Otherwise, they’d just laugh me out of Olympus or turn me into an animal or ignore me. You know how they are.” Luke waved his hand. There were shadows around his eyes. He looked very tired. “I’m just a demigod that they’ve been ignoring. What could I do except find someone more powerful to ally myself with and get their attention?” 

“Before you took me, they always answered my prayers,” I remembered. It felt like drawing the memories up through deep water. They were buried deep. “Now they’ve abandoned me to you.” 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you into what you are.” Luke’s voice cracked with emotion. He cleared his throat. “I just didn’t want to be alone anymore.” 

“You could have asked.” 

“You would have said no. Besides, I wasn’t planning on it being you.” 

Hearing those words again hurt but it was hardly noticeable. Just a drop in the bucket. I was already in so much pain. “I’m sick of being here.” 

“I know.” 

“I’m sick of feeling. And of my feelings for you. I don’t even know what they are but they hurt and I hate it.” I closed my eyes. The imprint of the stained glass showed up on my eyelids in a flash of inverted color. Part of me was scared that even if I left this place, I would still carry it with me forever. And Luke. I would carry him with me forever too. “At least you won’t be forgotten. I don’t think I could forget you if I tried to.” 

No reply. Sometimes I thought that I’d managed to single handedly break Luke. But that was giving me too much credit and not factoring in everyone else in his life. Regardless, Luke seemed like a shell of his former self and I thought with satisfaction that it was my fault. 

I closed the distance between us and kissed him. 

Luke kissed me back. He put a hand to the back of my head, no pressure, just threaded his fingers through my hair. When he pulled back, he didn’t meet my eye. 

My throat hurt like crazy and my earbuds were broken. I’d tried to strangle myself with the wire. The wire broke before killing me but it did leave a thin dark line across my throat. I healed it before Luke could see. Now we were laying in bed. I laid on my stomach, watching Luke. “Why didn’t you ever go to college? You were the oldest demigod at Camp.” 

Luke lay on his back, staring at the diamonds in the ceiling. He took a deep breath. “Going to college is a euphemism for being dead. I’m the oldest because all of the other ones died.” 

A chill that had nothing to do with the temperature made me shiver. I pulled the blanket up higher around my ears. “What do you mean?”

Luke rubbed a hand over his face. His hand shook. “Chiron and Dionysus tell us that the others went to college and are super busy living their lives so that we won’t look for them.”

That was exactly the kind of underhanded shady thing that they would do. I hated it when Luke was right. And he was right so often. “But you looked?”

“Yeah. I thought it was weird that everyone my age was disappearing. Before I knew it, I was the only one left. Everyone else was five or six or seven years younger than me.” A pained expression crossed his face. “And they just kept coming and getting younger and younger. Annabeth is still the youngest on record but only because one kid showed up on his eighth birthday.” 

“Do I know them?” I asked. 

Luke shook his head. “He got there, ah, I was sixteen so Annabeth was nine. Anyway, he died before his ninth birthday. Slipped on the climbing wall and got crushed between two boulders. You know, the ones that move?” Luke waited until I nodded. “It took me two months to fish his body out of there. The rocks move so fast. Broke my arm once but it’s not like I could just leave him there.” Tears rolled down Luke’s face. He covered his face with his arms and rolled so that his back was to me. 

The climbing wall at Camp Half-Blood was anything but safe. Hearing that someone died on it didn’t come as a surprise if I really stopped to think about it. “Why didn’t they get rid of the climbing wall?”

Luke’s voice broke twice before he managed, “He was a son of Iris. His life didn’t matter to the gods.” Luke furiously rubbed at his eyes. He sat up. “They barely care about their major demigod kids, but the kids of minor gods? Forget it. We’re all expendable to the gods, Percy, but some of us are more expendable than others.” 

I didn’t know what to say so I crawled into his lap and rubbed my cheek against his. The signs were all there, of course. But I’d been too distracted by being the hotshot son of Poseidon to care. 

Luke loosely wrapped his arms around my waist. He sobbed into my shoulder. Without him saying so, I knew he was crying for more than just the dead son of Iris. It turned out that I was just the cherry on top of a pain sundae. 

I didn’t want to be nicer to Luke, no matter how he tried to convince me to be. And yet, I felt myself thawing towards him. Not a lot, mind you. Just a little. It was in the small things. 

I didn’t bite him - as hard - when I mounted him. And I took his suggestion of kissing him whenever I wanted to die and put it into practice. As I had predicted, I kissed him a lot. My change of heart probably had a lot to do with hot much I was drinking but that wasn't the only factor. Luke let me see his bleeding heart and it moved me. Even after everything. Because Luke wasn't the only one with a bleeding heart.

**Author's Note:**

> Updates will be every Monday. 
> 
> I know most of you have my discord, but please for the love of gods, comment here.


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